I’ll give Chicago cartoonist Winston Gambro credit : he seems to really believe in his newest project, Overflow. After first serializing all 118 pages of it online, he self-published it as a trade paperback, and appears determined to get it in the hands of critics — even critics like myself, for whom dystopian genre sci-fi such as this is, let’s just say, well outside the usual wheelhouse and/or comfort zone. Mind you, it’s not that I actively dislike comics of this nature that are both rooted in, and attempting their level best to emulate, mainstream “indie” sensibilities — it’s more the case that I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to determine whether or not this is a good representative example of what it’s hoping to both be and achieve.

That being said, I certainly used to read a fair amount of Vertigo/Image/Dark Horse etc. stuff, and still peruse their…