I’m always hesitant to quote verbatim from a publisher’s promotional copy, but the tag line used by Kus! to describe cartoonist Lukas Weidinger’s Pirate & Parrot, #93 in their Mini Kus! series, is short, sweet, and to the point — as well as being eminently worth responding to. It simply states : “The pirate stands for desire. The parrot stands for opportunity. The fish stands for freedom. What do you stand for?” Very clever. Very cool. And utter hogwash, even if every word of it is true — which it probably is.

Look, I love a good existential brain-buster as much as anyone, but if you’re pondering over symbolism and deep philosophical meaning, you’re missing out on the point of Weidinger’s comic, which is simply this : it’s fun. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, in today’s cluttered comics world, I would even go so far as…

I don’t know how many of you fine readers ever managed to make it all the way through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, but if you did, congratulations — you’ve got me beat. It’s not that I found it completely impenetrable, mind you — although it certainly came close enough — it’s more a case that what I could understand about it easily enough didn’t sufficiently interest and/or motivate me to invest the time and effort necessary to figure out the rest. I’m not among those who consider Joyce to be an outright fraud, let me be absolutely clear about that, but I do think that this particular novel is one of his more average works, dressed up to make it seem like a weightier and more substantial tome than it really is.

But what do I know? Again, I never finished the thing.

It’s likely that cartoonist Nicolas Mahler

I assure you, it’s not a contractual obligation — my decision to cover everything that comes out as part of the long-running Mini Kus! series from Latvian art comics publisher Kus! is entirely voluntary. In fact, not to step too far “out of chracter,” but each new foursome of releases is one of the “events” in the comics world that I look forward to most — as a critic, yes, but even more importantly as a reader. I never know what I’ll find between the covers of one of these minis, but I always know it will be something challenging, something unexpected, and something that not only stands up to, but frankly demands multiple close and considered readings.

Their latest “round,” so to speak, exemplifies this standard perhaps more than any other — seriously, there’s not a misfire in the bunch — so if you’ll permit me (and you…