It’s a pretty cool thing, when you think about it : making comics like nobody else is making. And it’s especially cool to do it within a framework that’s about as tried and true as it gets.

All of which is me letting you know that the (extremely) short-form stories presented in Johan Broadley’s 2016 Le Dernier Cri book, Wild For Adventure, are both deliciously weird — and strangely mundane. We know this world he portrays — we’ve just never had it shown to us like this before. So yes, at first glance these are every bit the vaguely traditional gag strips they appear to be — until they’re not. And there’s always one or two off-kilter things in each that are guaranteed to shake your perceptions just a bit. I’m reminded, crazy as this may sound, of the so-called “creepy crawls” the Manson family used to engage in…

Aside from Gary Panter, no artist from the first wave of Raw has been more influential to the generations that came in his wake that Mark Beyer — and, like Panter, he’s never been content to simply rest on his laurels and let his reputation (to say nothing of his back catalogue) do the talking for him. Indeed, although he’s mainly moved into the world of “fine” art that he had one foot in from the outset, his work continues to both challenge and transfix, ever in pursuit of new statements to make and ideas to explore within a stylistic framework that’s immediately recognizable as his own and no one else’s.

Which brings us to the latest Beyer item to make its way into my hands, the Le Dernier Cri-published Mark Beyer : Sketchbook 2016-17, which eschews pretty much anything by way of titles or branding and just plunges…

Let’s be honest : at this point a person could commit an entire blog to reviewing nothing but quarantine-centric diary comics, simply because so many cartoonists are filling their own blogs with quarantine-centric diary comics themselves. Which is, of course, to be expected given present(-ish) circumstances — but it also means that it’s getting more and more difficult for any particular cartoonist’s quarantine work to stand out from the pack, simply because there’s a real glut of this kind of stuff out there.

Fellow Twin Cities resident Lance Ward needn’t worry, however — autobio has always been his “jam,” as the young folks said a few years back (when they were even younger — but then, so were all of us), and diary comics are often just short-form autobio strips in and of themselves. What makes his new collection of them, A Good Man’s Brother, a bit different than…

Culled from the pages of Providence’s legendary Paper Rodeo from 1995-2001, Fort Thunder alumnus Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce Shit is every bit the collection of curiosities one would expect, given that it’s an “odds and ends” compendium on its face — but who are we kidding here? The words “expect” and “Brinkman” don’t really belong in the same zip code together, much less the same sentence.

Italy’s Hollow Press — who recently issued a handsome, oversized hardcover collection of Brinkman’s Multiforce strips — were wise to go the completist route by assembling all this sidebar “shit” into this top-notch mini with production values to match the quality of its contents (archival quality cream-colored paper, heavy-duty cardstock covers with bronze-embossed exteriors covers and silver-embossed interiors), but this is no mere historical curiosity or relic of days gone by. That would be cool, but hardly essential, and I would submit that any assemblage…

Work is a death trap, and we all know it. If your job doesn’t kill you directly, it’ll likely kill you indirectly — either by means of stress-related conditions such as ulcers, repeated-motion fatigue and attendant joint decomposition/arthritis, heart disease, various work-induced cancers or, in a pinch, maybe you’ll get yourself killed in a car accident going to work, from work, or to or from some other place, such as a bar, hoping to forget about work for a little while. However you slice it, the minute you start punching a time clock, that clock is ticking against you.

In some cases, however, the connection between employment and death is a pretty straight line — like, what if your workplace literally sits atop a portal to hell? Which brings us to the first self-published mini (that I’m aware of, at any rate) from Michigan-based cartoonist Chris Russ, Eddie The…

I’ve reviewed a number of cat-centric comics on this site, so it’s time to even the score a bit — and there’s no more intriguing and unexpected a person to bring our canine friends to the table (errrmm, maybe that came out wrong) than Christopher Adams, whose Tack Piano Heaven manages to thematically encompass just about everything under the sun without confining itself to “be” any one thing in particular. Adams’ work is a constantly-shifting series of surprises, the very definition of “no solid ground,” so seeing him narrow his focus onto a singular subject is sure to yield interesting results — which brings us to his latest self-published ‘zine, Dog Book.

Strictly speaking, this is a 20-page “suite” of illustrations featuring, you guessed it, dogs, but it doesn’t take long to figure out there’s a lot more going on here than that. Utilizing any number of tools, including…

Originally self-published “way” back in 2017 but only now making its way in front of my eager eyes, Chicago cartooning legend Max Morris’ On Transit is an admirably rancid duo-tone nightmare very much in the Gary Panter tradition, albeit with perhaps an even more raw punk sensibility, and is a legit must-read item for anyone reliant upon the whims and vagaries of public transportation, particularly CTA buses — although the bus system of any major city works in a pinch as a substitute. And while the depiction of the ride herein is exaggerated for both comic and horrific effect, chances are good it’s going to ring true for most readers because, hey, most of us have been there and done that.

Like being a prison guard or a schoolteacher, driving a bus is one of those occupations where you’re better off admitting silently to yourself that the inmates are running…

If life in suburbia constitutes a kind of long, drawn-out soul death on the installment plan — and I’d contend there’s probably no need to start that sentence with an “if” — then what must life in suburban Florida be like? The mind shudders at the prospect of such a barren cultural wasteland, and yet — either enough people simply don’t care where the hell they live, or don’t see a problem with the idea of chugging gas-guzzling SUVs from one monstrous “cookie-cutter” chain business to another that the so-called “Sunshine Stare” is literally loaded with suburbs. And, like anywhere else, the kids who live there need to do something for fun.

In Portland cartoonist Ross Jackson’s 2017 Cold Cube-published mini Sticky Sweets, a pair of bored (of course) young teens decide the best way to while away part of their ample free time is to fuck off at…

One of the reasons I keep this blog going, despite having a fair number of other writing commitments and a distinct lack of time, is that around here I can write about whatever I want. And while I highly doubt that any cartoonist expects that they’ll get more than a 75- or 100-word “capsule” review for a 10-page mini they’ve made that sells for two bucks, reviewing stuff that nobody expects to see full-length reviews for, including the book’s creator, is one of those “whatever I want” things that I love doing. And you know what? A lot of those things nobody else is gonna review actually offer a fair amount to discuss and dissect.

All of which brings us to Scribbles #2, the latest (I think, at any rate) self-published mini from Bay Area “ink stud” Cameron Forsley, this time flying as a solo act without a story assist…

The rural British countryside has always held a certain mystique to those who aren’t from there — and to those who are, as well.  The supernatural and the entirely natural seem to have a way of converging in this “green and pleasant land” — from the stone circles to the crop circles to the fogous to the hill figures to, of course, the rumored  lines in the Earth from which the Czap Books/Grindstone Comics visual poetry series Ley Lines derives its name. Hypothesized by antiquarian/photographer/entrepreneur Alfred Watkins in three tracts he wrote in the 1920s to have been literally straight lines which connected many of the ancient mysteries just mentioned with hills, lakes, rivers, and villages, and to have served purposes both mystical (hidden energy grids) and mundane (trade and transportation routes), the Ley Lines remain an intriguing enigma, even if they might be complete bullshit — hell, maybe even