It’s never a bad time to have a look at the latest from Columbus, Ohio’s Brian Canini, and given that he’s got a veritable raft of new minis available, that “never a bad time” is, specifically, now. Each of the following is available for $1.99 from Canini’s Drunken Cat Comics self-publishing imprint at http://drunkencatcomics.storenvy.com/

Plastic People #9 continues Canini’s long-form narrative about the first murder in decades to occur in a plastic surgery-obsessed future Los Angeles. This time out our pair of detectives’ search for clues, motives, or both takes them to the First Church Of The Surgeons, a part-cult/part-nudist camp extolling the virtues of surgically-achieved “perfection” with a kind of religious zeal because — well, it’s a religion. Agreeably illustrated in Canini’s skillfully minimalist style, a few curious choices in terms of grammar and syntax aren’t enough to dampen my enthusiasm for what is one of the best…

Suffused throughout with a light touch that can best be described as genuinely tender, Maia Kobabe’s Lion Forge-published Gender Queer : A Memoir comes across as anything other than the seismic shift it is in terms of consciousness-raising — and maybe that’s what makes it one in the first place. Eschewing the polemic, Kobabe opts for the conversational and, as such, eir (Spivak pronouns — look ’em up if you must, I confess that I had to) story is universally accessible, but in no way represents a “dumbing-down” of its complex subject matter.

I’ll be the first to admit that as a straight white male I may just be the last critic on the planet qualified to comment on the story of a person slowly coming to terms with eir identity as a non-binary, asexual person, but by the same token, it’s folks in my shoes most in need…