“Super Fly meets The Equalizer?” Super fly! That’s why you might want to meet Jay Potts’s Blaxploitation homage, “World of Hurt.” As Potts describes it:

“WORLD OF HURT is a comic strip love letter to the Black action films of the 1970s. I’m not talking about the flicks with signifyin’ Technicolor pimps performing slow-motion karate or anything featuring Ray Milland’s head surgically attached to Rosie Grier’s body. If you want to know where I’m coming from with WORLD OF HURT, check out flicks like Shaft, Superfly, The Mack, Trouble Man, Foxy Brown, or Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off. Although none of these movies boasted massive budgets or flawless production values either, there was an undeniable edge and raw energy to them. These were films that spoke to a previously untapped market of urban Black audiences, who finally got to see their own heroes, and a bit of their own turbulent world, refracted through the prism of the silver screen.”

The weekly newspaper-style Web comic set in the 1970s follows Isaiah “Pastor” Hurt, a streetwise fixer in Pointe Blanc, California, as he investigates the disappearance of a bright young black woman, Alicia Patterson. Not only does it have a serious plot full of all the fist-flying, pow, fighting action you could want, but the Web site features blog entries giving readers the inside scoop on the artistic process.

What we like is that it’s not played for ironic jive-talkin’ laffs. As AintItCool.com put it: “…[S]tories paying homage to such blaxploitation films such as SUPERFLY, SHAFT, and FOXY BROWN are often written as spoofs. In WORLD OF HURT, the danger is real and the tone is straight…Approaching the material with a straight face is something fresh and new and worthy of notice.“

Plus, the clothes.