Fair warning : if you’re one of those folks who, reasonably enough, wants to know why a critic likes something (or otherwise), you may as well go no further. This review will only drive you batty. But, seriously — what other choice do I have?

George Horner’s self-published ‘zine Incoherents is, you see, not what it appears. The artist (he’s not a “cartoonist” in the traditional sense of the term) himself states that it’s “an artist book in the form of a comic book. Each page — torn out of a vintage (Golden & Silver Age) comic book and then painted in a redacting fashion, obscuring and abstracting text and images.” What this means, in purely practical terms, is a bunch of clipped drawings floating against mostly (though not exclusively) black backgrounds. Think Samplerman set in a void (or, if you like, the void), and you’re not too far off…

Is there a more all-encompassing trap than that of immortality? I mean, living forever sounds great on paper, but what if it actually came to pass?

Eight pages may sound like nowhere near enough to explore a topic this weighty, but in cartoonist Morgan Vogel’s self-published mini Valle, he manages to take a pretty good whack at it as his titular protagonist, and a handful of others, find themselves “shanghaied” (or possibly born — certainly endlessly reborn) into a vitrual reality scenario where they are not allowed to die. Which might be cool if the place looked fun, but it doesn’t.

Austere, I believe, is the word we’re looking for, one that applies to both the landscape of the “world” the story takes place in and to Vogel’s art, its simple yet undoubtedly expressive lines delineating what can only best be described as an endless expanse of…

There are a million ways to think — and, more importantly, to feel — about Isabel Reidy (or, as they bill themselves here, “Izzy True”)’s mind-bending and frankly devastating full-color mini Shitty Lover, but however you interpret it, one thing is for certain : you’ve bound to be impressed.

And I use that term in the strictest, most literal sense — this is work that leaves an impression. An impression that will no doubt vary from reader to reader and perhaps, even, from reading to reading, but nevertheless, a mark is always left. A very indelible mark, at that.

Magnificently painted in vibrant and arresting hues, the narrative here is necessarily a loose one, a tale of cosmic-level longing fulfilled in the form of a cruel joke at best, an ironic twist of fate at worst, as “shitty” love proves to be far more damaging, more negating