I’ve really been digging Elise Dietrich’s self-published minis lately, and it’s not hard to see why : meticulous in her attention to detail and determined to pack as many visual “goodies” into every panel as possible, her cartooning nevertheless seems to easily dodge the pitfalls of rigid formality and instead expresses itself as a kind of fluid, nearly spontaneous, quiet series of expertly-communicated mediations on the little things that make life — well, life, I guess. Which probably seems like a counter-intuitive thing for me to say given that in last year’s small diary comics collection, Making Time, she adheres fairly strictly to four-panel grids, hits a requisite narrative “beat” in the middle of each strip, and generally ends ’em all on something that could at least be loosely interpreted as a “punch line.” But there you go — comics, especially good comics, can be kinda weird like that.