Another one I’m a little bit “late to the party” in terms of getting around to reviewing is cartoonist Kat Rose’s self-published 2016 mini Opal Fruit, a challenging, bemusing, sometimes bewildering 10-page assemblage of figure (for the most part) drawings that cleverly uses its own simplicity to obfuscate what appears, after multiple “read”-throughs, to actually be a tightly-structured “suite” designed to elicit a particular set of reactions and interpretations not unlike, say, Nick Thorburn’s much longer — though equally wordless — Penguins. There’s one key difference, though : whereas Thorburn’s constructs hew much closer to a linear start-to-finish “strip” configuration, this is a legit “free-for-all” that follows a rhythm, to be sure, but nothing so conventional as an actual structure.

That makes it perplexing at times, I’ll grant you, but it also means it’s never less than thoroughly intriguing and engrossing — provided you’re the sort…