The 1970s were known as the “Me Decade,” but if there’s one thing that the rise of social media has made abundantly clear, it’s that vainglorious self-centeredness didn’t end on December 31st, 1979 — it was just getting started. You’ve got people posting and tweeting about everything from their political opinions to what they cooked for dinner, and everything in between, and quite often filming whatever they’re doing just to prove they’re doing it. If you want the dull minutiae of your life out there for all to see, there’s nothing but your own good sense to stop you from putting it out there — and common sense seems to be as short in supply as egocentrism is abundant. And so here we are, in a world where the once-unthinkable reigns supreme — why, even no-count government office employees who can’t draw seem to think, for some reason, that people…

My only previous exposure to Canadian cartoonist and ‘zinemaker Jonny Petersen came by way of his Space Basket comic that Domino published some years back, which followed a pretty straightforward (if admittedly bizarre and hilarious) narrative, so I was pretty well floored when I received a couple of his latest self-published minis, which are highly interpretive works set within a tight conceptual framework deployed in service of different goals. This review and the next one forthcoming on this site will take a look at each in detail, so let’s get started with the one that’s got the longest title — as well as one of the longest titles you’ll ever find in general, A Brief Yet Rambling Journey Through A Bunch Of Country Style Quotes And Bits Of Useless Advice, which is admittedly a real mouthful but offers quite a bit to take in visually, as well as to…

One thing I’ve come to appreciate about Jason T. Miles’ comics and ‘zines over the years — and which undoubtedly holds true for his latest self-published effort, What Its Like — is that he simply doesn’t have time to fuck around. Take, for instance, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it misspelling in the title here : I assume it to be intentional, but I could be entirely wrong about that, and the beauty of the whole things is that it really doesn’t matter much either way. There’s a ferocity to this story, these drawings, the entire project that speaks of someone sitting down at the drawing board and getting it all down on paper before it goes away. And now that it’s out in the world in print, it ain’t going anywhere.

Everything here is abstract, it’s true, but also recognizable to one degree or another — not as a hard-and-fast “thought” or…

“Why, sir —” long-suffering butler Alfred inquires of Bruce Wayne in Frank Miller’s classic The Dark Knight Returns, “—whatever happened to your moustache?”

Providence’s Ryan Alves is out to do a lot more than flip that query on its head with his recent AWE Comics newspaper broadsheet Moustache, though — and while it may not always be clear what his ambitions and aims are, his atmospheric blend of rich black inks, cinematic panel compositions, well-placed washes (or a digital approximation thereof, at any rate?), intricate linework, and good old-fashioned improvisational drawing at the very least marks this as the best-looking “Bat book” to come down the pike in ages, certainly better than anything DC seems even capable of producing with the “real” thing. Which brings us to the big question, namely —

So what is this early-days story featuring the most thinly-veiled analogue for the Caped Crusader ever…