I’ve sung the praises of Louisiana cartoonist Kyle Bravo’s unassuming (and, crucially, unforced) self-published autobio series Forever And Everything in the past — and will no doubt feel suitably compelled to do so again — but reading his two latest issues, numbers six and seven, back-to-back in one sitting is a quietly powerful experience the likes of which few things can really compare to. Which is ironic (sorry), of course, because I get the impression such was hardly Bravo’s intention when he created them.

Still, we live in (are coming out of?) unprecedented times, as the entirely accurate cliche goes, and as such intention can have little if anything to do with how a work is received — which, I suppose, is always true, but is doubly (at least) so nowadays. All of which is my roundabout (to put it far too kindly) way of saying that we are talking…

From the depths of space to the depths of hell to the depths of the mind to the depths of depravity, Annie, the titular Acid Nun of illustrator extraordinaire Corinne Halbert’s new self-published mini, covers a lot of territory — but then, you’d expect nothing less, I would suppose, given that a comic with a dizzyingly lurid name had damn well better serve up the dizzyingly lurid goods to match.

Of course, with an artist of Halbert’s skills, most of that luridness is going to be expressed visually, and she certainly doesn’t disappoint on that front : this is a veritable tableau of sexually explicit violent psychedelia rendered with the care of a true enthusiast, a celebratory paean to the libertine spirit and ethos delivered with a passion that can’t be faked. There’s good and there’s evil, then there’s beyond good and evil, and then somewhere well beyond even that