The welcome news that Max Clotfleter, the enfant terrible of the Seattle cartooning scene, will finally be seeing the first comprehensive collection of his comics coming out later this year — courtesy of Birdcage Bottom Books and bearing the title Rooftop Stew (the cover of which is pictured near the bottom of this review) —shouldn’t obscure the fact that he’s been been cobbling together much of his work from parts various and sundry for several years now in the pages of his self-published series Andros, the eighth and most recent issue of which is probably as fine an example of “Clotfelter in microcosm” as you’re likely to find. Assuming, of course, that finding such a thing would be of interest to you.

And hey, who are we kidding? It certainly should be. There’s no doubt that much of Clotfelter’s sensibility emerges from the “confessional/autobio” tradition — see, for example…

A visually lurid and kaleidoscopic amalgamation of the fragmentary, the jumbled, the confused/confusing, and a good deal of the utterly inexplicable, Jason T. Miles’ mini My Fanny #1 (self-published under his G.O.A.T. imprint) is nevertheless a rewarding experience — just don’t ask me to be able to quantify why that’s the case.

Which, I suppose, negates the whole idea of me positioning myself as a “critic” in the first place, but shit — that’s Miles for you. Few cartoonists are as adept as he is at defying everything you think you know about anything, mostly by dint of just ignoring all that exists outside of his own very particular set of sensibilities and/or instincts, and getting you to either buy in or, failing that, simply get the fuck out of his way. There’s no guidebook to either making or reading comics like this, so — go with the flow…