When the fist page of your new mini pretty much sums up everything that everybody who’s been making so-called “quarantine comics” over the past year has been trying to say, then I’m going to credit you with doing two things remarkably well : cutting to the chase, and clearing the decks to facilitate moving on to something (please, God, anything!) else. Not that the pandemic doesn’t hang over the rest of November Garcia’s latest Birdcage Bottom-published ‘zine, (Even) More Diary Comics From A Relative Nobody #2, as surely as it hangs, Sword of Damocles-style, over all of our lives, but let’s not forget — there’s other shit going on, too. And some of that shit is even important.

Admittedly, as the title of this review gives away plainly, this is is a short little comic (it was created as a Kickstarter premium for the latest — and final…

There’s a dreamlike quality to Lauren Hinds’ new release from Paper Rocket Mini Comics, Jeremy, that’s so undeniable that I honestly spent most of my first read-through of the book thinking that the boy the title refers to was an imaginary friend of our unnamed protagonist, who we’ll just call The Kid ( with apologies to Prince). The Kid narrates/relates the entire saga of their friendship from his own first-person POV, and he and Jeremy get up to all kinds of secretive shit (mostly revolving around stealing plums, sneaking off into the forest, or sneaking off into the forest in order to steal plums), so hey — even though Jeremy is talked about by The Kid’s parents, and other adults, and even though he interacts with other school kids (often to his detriment), I really thought we were going to find, in the end, that he was just a…

Okay, fair enough, in purely chronological terms it may have only encompassed a handful of days, and in purely geographic terms it may have only taken us from Baltimore to Milwaukee and back again, but it certainly feels like we’ve been on quite a journey with the nerd/outcast clique at the heart of Colin Lidston’s sublime The Age Of Elves series from Paper Rocket Mini Comics, and in purely emotional terms it’s fair to say that we have — and so it’s only fitting, as this remarkably heartfelt, but decidedly unvarnished, look at the lives of high school “geeks” comes to a close, that the focus is squarely on Sara, the most fleshed-out character of the group and our “entry point” as readers from word go. Yes, this is an ensemble-cast story after a fashion, but it’s really been her story all along, and as such hers is the only…

Projects that have complex and circuitous gestation processes and then emerge fully-formed into the world as something entirely other than that which they were originally intended to be are, as you’d expect, a hit-or-miss proposition, but when they hit sometimes they really hit : David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, for instance, famously began on paper as a TV pitch centered around Sherilyn Fenn’s Audrey Horne character from Twin Peaks ditching the Pacific Northwest for the bright lights of Hollywood, while Jack Kirby’s amazingly prescient OMAC evolved from a scuttled re-boot of Captain America that was to be set in the far future. The lesson here being, I suppose, to never let a “course correction” — or even several of them — get you down. If your central conceit is strong enough, it’ll be able to survive many twists and turns before taking its final shape.

Now, we can add to…

“Just let it go” is easy enough advice to give to anyone who is, as the popular vernacular would have it, going through some shit, but it’s considerably more difficult to follow. And when tragedy has befallen a person, deciding what to let go of becomes all the more impossible to figure out. I have, for instance, known people who got rid of all of any and reminders of an ex after a breakup, only to wish they had something — anything — of theirs back later, while on the other side of the coin, I’ve known people who have lost a loved one who simply can’t bear to part with a single reminder of them, no matter how inconsequential or trivial some of the crap they left behind may seem to the outside observer.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is, when it comes to traumatic…

Right off the bat, this ‘zine is wrapped in a pretty thick layer of mystery, beginning with : what, exactly, is its title? Is it called Rasberry Blue? Is it called Rasberry Blue Untitled, given the latter word appears at the bottom of the cover? Or is it, perhaps, Rasberry Blue/Untitled, meaning that it likely contains two stories/strips? It’s a head-scratcher, to be sure, but in the end I settled on the full name cartoonist Joey Tepedino gives it on the insider front cover, The Kingdom Of Rasberry Blue Untitled, since you really can’t lose by picking out the longest of several title “options” on offer. But, really, that’s just the beginning as far as the question marks go.

The year it came out, for instance, is nowhere to be found within — nor is any copyright information whatsoever, And a stickler for grammar such as…

The surest sign you’ve hit on a winning idea comes in the form of staying power. Anybody can catch lightning in a bottle, or get a stroke of beginner’s luck or what have you, but longevity — well, that takes some real doing.

While I only have two of them myself (the other being 2019’s Brick Breaks Free, which I just reviewed), the just-released (and self-published) Brick By Brick is actually the fourth collection of strips featuring his anthropomorphic (to a degree, at any rate) Brick character from Toronto’s David Craig, and while logic might dictate that the premise would have worn itself thin by now, I feel it’s my duty to remind you that bricks themselves are, in fact, both thick and sturdy — and it appears the same can be said for Craig’s imagination.

Collecting strips that appeared over the last few years in the pages…

Point one : it seems to me that if there’s one thing that a cartoonist needs if they want to be successful in the short humor strip game, it’s cleverness. I mean, yeah, you’ve gotta be able to draw, and an inherent sense of comic timing helps considerably, but without the added spark that cleverness brings to the equation, more often than not your strips are either going to miss the mark by that small but crucial degree, or else fail to land altogether. And the surest sign that you’re going to be reading a clever strip is if, of course, it has a clever premise. Which brings us to —

Point two : nothing is more utilitarian than a brick, yet they never seen to get the credit they deserve. For instance, last summer we had to re-do the brick walls on our house, and while the whole…

I’ve never put too much stock in astrology, myself, but for our purposes here that’s entirely immaterial : I know good art when I see it. And I know that when good art is presented within a strong conceptual framework, then you’ve got yourself the making of a really cool ‘zine. And if there’s one thing Amy Brereton’s self-published Horrorscopes is without question, it’s an exceptionally cool ‘zine indeed.

Getting the particulars out of the way first, it’s an impressive enough physical object in its own right, printed on a satin-finished heavyweight paper stock in gorgeous full color with a sturdy clear vinyl protector over its grimly gorgeous cover, the whole thing spiral-bound for ease of flipping through (it’s also signed, numbered, and dated on the back, published as it is in a limited run of 100 copies) — but “easy” isn’t a word we’ll be applying in any other…

There are mysteries, there are riddles, there are enigmas, and then there are those things that are all three wrapped around each other, as Joe Pesci’s David Ferrie informed us in Oliver Stone’s JFK back in the days when conspiracies were kinda cool and outre and not solely the province of dudes in animal pelts and portly rendering plant workers who have taken it upon themselves to impose their bizarre worldview on the rest of us by storming the halls of congress. I’m not here to talk about MAGA nitwits, though — beyond the extent to which I just did, I guess — I’m here to talk about Lane Yates and Michael R. Muller’s new self-published mini, If On Account Of Sunday, which fits the bill of what Pesci was talking (okay, babbling) about to the proverbial “T.”

Ostensibly based on the Norse myth about the origins of the…