I once opined — and I’m hardly the first to have done so, trust me — that it’s good practice for cartoonists, and really artists of all stripes, to step outside their comfort zones and try something different, but I’ll let you in on a little secret : the same is absolutely true for critics.

As prima facie evidence of this assertion, I offer up Austin-based cartoonist Ashley Robin Franklin’s new little book from Silver Sprocket, That Full Moon Feeling, which lithely threads the needle between two genres that are by and large of little interest to me, specifically romantic comedy and the supernatural, yet nevertheless managed to warm my cynical middle-aged cis white male heart and plant an entirely unforced smile on my face for the duration of its 64 pages. Which, admittedly, is me giving away the final verdict of this review early on, but I do…

It’s always a treat when a staple of your reading youth (and in this case I use the term “youth” advisedly, as I was well into my twenties when the series in question originally saw print) becomes available again for a new generation to enjoy — or for members of your own generation who may have missed out on it the first time around to finally discover for themselves. There’s bound to be a bit of risk involved in re-visiting something you hold in high esteem, though, isn’t there? I mean, a person’s tastes and expectations change over time, there’s no doubt about that — or at least they damn well should — so what appealed to you at age 25 stands a very real chance of just not doing the job for your 40-something self. Above and beyond that, though, there’s also a very real possibility that changing times

There’s this profoundly goofy, pathetic, and intellectually impotent notion on the political right that Antifa is some grand top-down organization, hell-bent on destroying the so-called “American way of life,” flush with cash from George Soros and other “globalist” (i.e. Jewish) donors, and lurking in the shadows within every institution just waiting for the right moment to pull the string and bring society to its knees on behalf of its “Marxist” overlords.

It’s absurd on its face, of course — but also entirely emblematic of the kind of shared fever-swamp delusion that has become the right’s stock in trade ever since they elevated a six-times-bankrupt, syphilitic, failed game show host/con man to cult leader status. Of course you’d have to be dumber than a festering, putrefying nine-ton sack of pigshit to believe it (hell, Trump’s own FBI director said Antifa was “an ideology, not an organization”), but ya know what? I’m…

Cartoonist Sean Knickerbocker — who, like yours truly, hails from Minneapolis — has long been concerned with narratives that focus on the socially and economically marginalized and dispossessed, telling authentic stories about the forgotten people of “flyover country.” Now, he’s both sharpening and expanding his focus simultaneously with his recently-launched anthology series, Rust Belt Review. Sean was kind enough to answer some of my questions about this new project , and our conversation is presented here along with sample pages from the first issue by, respectively, Caleb Orecchio, Audra Stang, and Knickerbocker himself.

Four Color Apocalypse : What made you decide that now was the time to attempt to launch a new anthology, and what unique editorial sensibilities do you bring to the project that you think aren’t present and accounted for in other anthologies at the moment?

Sean Knickerbocker : The pandemic definitely pushed me in this direction. Since…

Formatted as a rounded-edges digest with an open spine revealing a visible glued binding, Liesbeth De Stercke’s 2016-published sketchbook collection from Bries, Black Clouds Rolling In, is a curious and instantly-memorable physical object in its own right, as well as being one that quietly but forcefully beckons you to explore its contents in detail — and that word right there, detail, perhaps best sums the project up better than any other.

One glance at the cover tells you that De Stercke is a stickler for it, believes in it, thrives on it — and so she does, not a thing escapes her notice. But this collection of sketches of the Great Depression/Dust Bowl era — produced at a daily clip throughout the course of 2013 — isn’t just concerned with physical and environmental detail. They represent only half of the equation. The other half that De Stercke deftly…

Picking up somewhere well beyond the farthest limit of what could safely be labeled the “avant garde,” Montreal experimental multi-media artist Billy Mavreas’ latest (I think, at any rate — it’s an undated publication) self-published mini, Open All The Way, represents perhaps the apex of his “studied minimalist” approach to date, leaving behind the oblique links to narrative of prior efforts such as The Realms and The Burden Of Possibilities in favor of a richer, yet paradoxically even more austere, approach to grappling with many of the same themes, chief among them being explorations of creativity in the abstract and the nature of consciousness itself.

You needn’t, however, feel in any way intimidated by the admittedly weighty nature of what’s on offer here — consider the title both an invitation and a case of artistic truth in advertising, given that Mavreas is, by nature, someone who views possibility as…

Dare I say there’s something refreshing about reading a ‘zine full of pre-pandemic diary comics, heartless as that no doubt may sound?

Certainly, at this point it’s safe to state that we’ve all been affected by COVID-19 to one degree or another, and many a reader of this review will likely have lost a friend or relative to the disease, so perhaps it’s inherently self-indulgent to yearn for a simpler time, and yet — even the simpler times were often not that simple, and if there’s one thing that Thomas Lampion’s 2019 self-published diary comics mini This Wasn’t What I Had In Mind reminds us of, it’s that the “good old days” had their problems and challenges, as well.

One of them, however, was most assuredly not a world under medically-necessitated lockdown, and as a result the various personal challenges he’s struggling with in and around April of 2019, which…

I live by a simple motto around these parts : if it defies classification, description, and rational analysis, then it’s something I want to see. Other critics can give you the lowdown on stuff that can be categorized, labeled, genre-boxed, and otherwise defined — and hey, I do a fair amount of that myself — but when it comes to the stuff that starts somewhere beyond the point where the ability to articulate a traditional critique of it stops, well, that’s the kind of work that’s always going to catch my eye and always going to be something I want to talk about, if only because the very act of talking about it is such a tricky proposition.

Comics is an art form that I feel lends itself rather well to such efforts, simply because the fourth-dimensional construct of time can be fucked with, or even dispensed with altogether…

The second of Mike Shea-Wright’s new self-published minis dedicated to celebrating pre-COVID social get-togethers that would now properly be classified as “super-spreader” events, Beach, represents perhaps a greater flight of fancy than its de facto “twin” release, Venue, in that the events depicted in that comic could — indeed, often do — happen pretty much as depicted, while the events depicted in this one really aren’t likely to at all, but hey, what do I know? Maybe Shea-Wright just frequents far more interesting beaches than I do — and maybe you do, as well.

In short, this is a wordless story about an afternoon at a beach that becomes one big naked party and, as such, the goals of the author are perhaps a bit broader here than simply showing the purported “joys” of a large gathering of people : indeed, the “all bodies are beautiful” and “de-stigmatize…

Chances are that you’re as tired of being cooped up as I am, but I’ll say this much : one of the “net pluses” of the pandemic (sorry, there really has to be a better way of phrasing that, but I’ll be damned if I can think of what that would be right now) has been a creativity and productivity boom among self-publishing and otherwise-independent cartoonists. Most of us are well-familiar with the justly-lauded strips being shared daily on instagram by Alex Graham, Simon Hanselmann, and others, but it’s not like the printed page has been abandoned completely in this “brave” new world, either (indeed, Graham has just collected her Dog Biscuits series in a massive 400-plus-page volume she’s selling through Lulu and the entirety of Hanselmann’s “Crisis Zone” will be released in a single volume in fairly short order from Fantagraphics) — which brings us to Mike Shea-Wright and…