The blacklight-and-neon-green cover to Bonkers, issue #35 of S! The Baltic Comics Magazine, a product of the imagination of Norwegian cartoonist Erlend Peder Kvam — who also provides one of the anthology’s strongest strips, a sing-song number that features a trio of anthropomorphic animal/space creature hybrids going about their largely-leisurely business with a spring in their step and a shared “hive-mind” between then — announces that the tightly-focused themes that most volumes of this series tether themselves to is pretty well out the window this time out, and that in its place we have an eclectic gathering of artists from around the globe quite literally letting it all hang out. All well and good, right?

But when you crack that cover open, things by and large get even better, as the “gallery-show-in-the-palm-of-your-hand” editorial remit the title has always lived and died by turns out to lend itself

Kevin Hooyman, of Conditions On The Ground renown, is a perfect choice for the Mini Kus! line — well-established as it is for providing a venue for individualistic, even idiosyncratic, artists to tell short-form stories (assuming they decide to even tell “stories” at all) — and his newly-released mini presented under the imprint’s imprimatur (okay, that was a bit redundant), Elemental Stars, may be #82 in the series, but damn if it won’t quickly become #1 in your heart.

In a dull pastel world populated by anthropomorphic animals/people/aliens/does it really even matter?, a group of neighbors that may or may not be actual “friends” search for the Crystal City that came to one one of them in dream — which may be no accident. Assuming such a city even exists, of course, and that is by no means a guaranteed proposition. But hey — the quest is the…

An instruction manual like no other, Chicago-based artist Lilli Carre’s  Open Molar (#80 in the ongoing Mini Kus! line) is at times as utterly indecipherable as an Ikea assembly guide, but infinitely more interesting and, most crucially, rewarding. But what you come up with at the end is still fairly well up for grabs.

Billing itself as teaching readers how to “create a drop-shape for slow relief,” with the caveats that “this solution is only intended for gapped interiors,” and that one should “not skip the first step,” it probably goes without saying that said first step is both the most obvious and the most unattainable, but I’m not about to “spoil” what it is here. It’ll have to suffice to know that how well and how thoroughly you’ve already mastered it will determine how far you go with subsequent instructions — not to mention (except, ya know, I am)