A heady mix of of the explicitly alien, the vaguely Aztec, the less-vaguely Navajo,  and the even-less-vaguely-than-that Blackfeet, Missoula, Montana-based cartoonist Theo Ellsworth creates totem pole art on paper by way of some interdimensional bridge to realms unknown, and the influence of native peoples makes its presence as surely felt in his narratives as it is in his illustrations, centered as they often are on rites of passage that are tribal in origin, but transposed into a very, even obsessively, personal setting. His 2015 Mini Kus! offering (#35 in the series), Birthday, is no exception, and may just represent the surest and most concise distillation of his overall artistic project as just about anything he’s done.

And speaking of obsessiveness, Ellsworth utilizes every last micro-millimeter of every panel on every page, his highly-detailed drawings a kaleidoscopic exorcism (one of his books, also published by Kus! and reviewed on…

We might as well make it clear at the outset, not that there’s probably much doubt : no, This No Place To Say (published in 2013 and bearing #18 in the Mini Kus! series on its spine — errr, okay, back cover) isn’t by that Michael Jordan — this one’s a German neo-surrealist cartoonist with an Eraserhead-era Lynchian sensibility and an apparent predilection for colors that fall roughly in the “mustard” range. I tried to get to this one (as well as the next comic I’ll be reviewing, Theo Ellsworth’s Birthday) during Kus! theme week at the end of September, but time ran out on me, so — better late than never?

The subconsciously-channeled narrative here involves a stand-in for the author falling through his coffee cup into a densely bureaucratic medical facility carved into the side of a mountain, where he may or may not require treatment…