Ariel Cooper’s first self-published comic, Ghost Sickness, blew me away. Her second, Castle Of The Beast (sub-titled A Theory Of Time Travel) goes even further, shattering your view of the so-called “fourth dimension” and re-assembling it into something immediately and intrinsically familiar, but nevertheless altogether different. And I say this, mind you, as somebody who’s felt that the concept of time was complete bullshit pretty much since I was a teenager.

Linear time has been assaulted from every angle in the not-too-distant “past” — scientific treatises from Stephen Hawking, anarchist broadsides from John Zerzan, and 1,300-page literary masterworks from Alan Moore have all taken a crack at the foundations of its crumbling edifice — but Cooper is taking a different tack, presenting a work of art that makes you feel your way toward a better, deeper, and yes, more accurate understanding of the ultimately undefinable force…

Here’s the thing about Seattle cartoonist Kalen Knowles — yes, his stuff is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. And yes, some of it’s admirably and astonishingly weird. Anyone even mildly familiar with his work knows these things. What’s less remarked upon, though, at least as far as I can tell, is how — dare I invoke the term — heartwarming a whole lot of it is.

He’s also well-attuned to the perspective of the genuine outcast and outsider, the person (or, more often, creature) who simply doesn’t fit in, who stands apart, whose individuality can’t really be subsumed under layers of “going along to get along” deliberate obfuscation. Combine that sympathetic understanding with that penchant for the — again with the dread word — heartwarming, and the results can be pretty special, indeed. Example number one of this was Journal, the innovatively-told story of Atticus the squid boy previously reviewed…

After a long period of silence and speculation, iconoclastic small-press mainstay publisher 2dcloud has re-emerged with their 2019 kickstarter campaign. I recently spoke with co-publisher/founder Raighne (the surname “Hogan” is no more) about matters past, present, and future. Full disclosure : I’m rooting for their campaign to be successful and plan on contributing myself, but there are a number of people in the small-press community who feel that they’d like some more concrete answers as to what’s going on before they make the decision of whether or not to back the campaign themselves. His answers here may or may not satisfy, but after well over a year of shying away from anything resembling the “limelight,” it’s important, I feel, to give Hogan the chance to answer some questions so that people can make an informed decision on whether or not they wish to support his company’s efforts going forward.

For…