I love a good challenge, but few things have taxed my feeble mind more in recent weeks than figuring out just how the hell I was going to approach this review. The work of Isabel Reidy (or, if you prefer, Izzy True) is always breathtakingly and wondrously open to interpretation, it’s true, but their self-published mini from a few years back, True Friendship Now, is probably the most ambiguous of the bunch : a rumination of sorts on exactly what its title implies, certainly, but also on identity and its boundaries and on absorption, even cross-contamination, of people (or, as is customary with Reidy, creatures), ideas, emotions, realities.

If it sounds like a lot to mull over, rest assured that it is, but that doesn’t mean the book itself is a rough slog by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a brisk enough read on the surface, as…

Somewhere in between life’s big moments is hidden, I’m told, its secrets, its power, its richness. The literal “little things that make life worth living.” I humbly submit that no cartoonist around these days captures the often-bittersweet character of those “little” things than Keiler Roberts, and her latest Koyama Press collection, Chlorine Gardens, is the best evidence yet for this assertion.

Not that the book doesn’t chronicle huge, life-changing moments and do so with a kind of quietly vigorous poignancy : the birth of her daughter Xia, a fixture in her strips for years now, is related by means of both “emotional memory” and “just the facts” experiential narrative; her grandfather’s death is told as part rumination on the importance of familial ties, part philosophical treatise on mortality as that which well and truly unites us all; her continuing struggles with bipolar disorder give her ample opportunity to hone…