Still firmly in catch-up mode (but with light at the end of the tunnel), this week’s grab-bag of items that arrived in my mailbox includes three self-published comics from Kalen Knowles, one of the most distinctive voices in the Seattle underground, and another from Philly’s Pat Aulisio, who continues to blow me away with his idiosyncratic visions. Why waste time? Let’s have a look at the good stuff, and this time out it’s all good —

Knowles’ Journal is like nothing else I’ve ever seen in my life, a densely-packed sketchbook diary (think the Wimpy Kid books and you’re getting warm) told from the POV of a young octopoid alien named Atticus that is almost disarmingly clever and imbued with a genuine sense of charm and wonder throughout. Atticus’ world — hell, his entire space/time continuum — bears certain similarities to our own, but rather than employing these as set-pieces…

On the one hand, this is an extremely easy book to review — and on the other, it’s an extremely difficult one.

Chances are, you see, that most readers going into Spanish comics master Esteban Maroto’s IDW-published hardback Lovecraft : The Myth Of Cthulhu are going to be well familiar with the three H.P. Lovecraft adaptations collected herein — “The Nameless City,” “The Festival,” and “The Call Of Cthulhu” are, after all, the first three entries in the legendary “Cthulhu Cycle,” and have been translated into the comics medium a good number of times already (despite the rather curious claim made in Jose Villarrubia’s otherwise-fine introduction to this volume that Lovecraftian works are rarely adapted for comics) — and therefore what’s of primary interest here is not so much what’s being presented as how it’s being presented. The usual plot recaps and the like that accompany most self-respecting reviews are…