What can you get done in four hours? Clean the house? File your taxes? Re-arrange your bookshelves? Work half your shift?

Max Clotfelter can crank out some pretty damn cool comic strips, and he’s been doing so for five years as part of Seattle’s monthly Dune meet-up/comics “jam,” a regular ritual that challenges cartoonists to literally write and draw “whatever comes to mind.”

Clotfelter’s always been wildly inventive, of course, creating comics that bridge the stylistic and thematic gap from old-school undergrounds to present-day “aht comics,” but perusing the contents of his recently-released Rat Tactics ‘zine shows something of a hitherto-unremarked-upon (as far as I know, at any rate) evolution in his work, albeit in severely, wondrously truncated form : the yarns at the start, dating back to 2012, are rough-hewn affairs with little by way of concern for even storytelling basics, much less actual narrative, pesky little concerns…