Self-doubt is a crippling thing, but never has it been delineated in a manner as sensitive, as smart, as intuitive as in the pages of Angela Fanche’s latest mini-comic, Everly. This is work that comes from a deep wellspring of very personal experience, but the damn thing is : Fanche is such a singularly talented cartoonist, one so fundamentally in tune with her abilities and intentions, that she needn’t second-guess herself for so much as an instant.

Despite having a fairly robust internet presence, most of which consists of her occasionally-issued diary comics, Fanche isn’t someone I know a tremendous amount about, but a comic like this tells you as much as you need : her delicate texturing and shading, combined with deft figure work, definitely gives her art an ethereal, even wistful quality to it, but employed in service of painfully introspective subject matter such as this, well…

I’ll give Patrick Keck credit for this much — visually speaking, he knows how to pack a hell of a lot into eight pages.

Deftly-applied rich and inky blacks that belie a woodcut influence on the one end and a DIY “ugly art” aesthetic on the other meet somewhere in the middle to congeal into a truly unique and visceral style, more defiantly “in your face” than Keck’s been in many recent works (folks who only know him from Twilight Of The Bat are gonna be floored), but beyond that, what’s offered here on the day-glo yellow pages of his most recent self-published ‘zine, Werewolf By Night Kitchen, is a decidedly mixed, if intriguing, bag. I think I have a solid grip on what Keck was hoping to achieve with this short-form work — but I’m not at all convinced he manages to pull it off.

Tell you what…