I like to think that I’ve reviewed some pretty interesting and unusual things in my time, but this one may just take the cake — not because cartoonist Kriota Willberg’s latest self-published mini (it came out in late 2019), Cat Friends, Bird Acquaintances, And Their Human Furniture is necessarily challenging either conceptually or technically, but because it’s well and truly one of those things that you sort of have to see to believe that it even exists, since at first glance one could be forgiven for assuming that any sort of readership for it, well, doesn’t.

Not that “readership” is the right word here exactly, given this is a small — and silent — “suite” of thematically-linked anatomical illustrations with a twist, but honestly, that’s neither here nor there. The main point I’m at least attempting to get at here is that the existence of a publication this specialized, this…

I’ve gotta hand it to fellow Minneapolitan M.S. Harkness — if you’re going to release a comic set on (and immediately after) election day 2016, then choosing to do so on the eve of the 2020 election is a savvy move. And if there’s one thing you can say for Harkness in addition to being creative, it’s that she’s very much in tune with the times — as anyone who’s read her satirical evisceration of online dating, Tinderella, can tell you — so it should come as no surprise that her latest self-published mini, Rotten, is as timely and topical as it is, well, twisted.

And true. Albeit with a bit of artistic license thrown in for (melo)dramatic effect. But such is usually the case with autobio to one degree or another, and parsing out the accurate from the amped-up is pretty much just part and parcel…

Hmmm — this is a strange situation. Usually I’ll let you know if you should buy and/or read a comic or not, but when it comes to Michael Aushenker’s latest self-published number, Trolls : 1 Trip 2 Many — the third installment of his ongoing Trolls series (just look, the numbers in the title even add up!) — I might just have to give it a grade of “I” for incomplete.

I think, at any rate. It’s hard to say. And how successful this particular comic may be really does depend on what happens next — or not. Are you confused yet? Because there’s really no reason why you wouldn’t be.

Let me try to break it down — this comic starts off with our erstwhile protagonists, lovable fuck-ups Edward and Mayward, in a typically ridiculous situation : they’re being rocketed to Mars on the “Spaced X” probe owned by billionaire…

I’m not sure that the name of Matt Furie is separable from that of his most (in?)famous creation, Pepe the Frog, at this point, but there’s no harm in attempting to declare your independence, right? To that end, we have something of a Furie “rehab tour” going on, not that he’s responsible for the alt-right/MAGA crowd’s usurpation of his character for their usual diabolical purposes. Step one is separating oneself as clearly as possible from the fracas, which is being achieved by means of the new documentary film Feels Good Man, and step two is to just, ya know, create some new work — and if there’s one thing Fantagraphics’ forthcoming hardback collection of Furie’s (mainly) painted art, Mindviscosity, proves, it’s that he’s been working his ass off.

Having publicly “killed” Pepe off in a comic strip, he’s turned his attention to painting more fully, and while…

One could make a strong argument that Paula Lawrie takes the most unique approach to memoir of any graphic artist working today, filtering her childhood experiences through a modernist lens in the pages of her ongoing My Geometic Family ‘zine — which we’ve examined on this blog in the past and whose title I would encourage you to take quite literally indeed — but I think what strikes me most about her work, in addition to the combination of technical expertise and  visionary conceptualization evidenced in all of her richly-detailed illustrations, is how she seamlessly combines the dual viewpoints of her young, admittedly naive, self with that of the worldly (perhaps even world-weary) grown woman that she is today. It’s one thing to see events through a child’s eyes, but quite another to see them through the eyes of an adult who is, in turn, seeing them through…

A few years back, I got a bunch of shit on Twitter for telling a newbie comic critic who said “I’m really not comfortable talking much about art yet” that they had no business reviewing works in this medium until they were. Now, granted, this individual was likely mostly — if not entirely — trying their hand at reviewing “Big Two” stuff, but even still : if all you’re talking about is the writing, then you’re giving short shrift to the person who spends more time than anyone else working on the latest issue of Justice League or The Avengers or whatever. And you wouldn’t have the capacity to review an extraordinary work like Aidan Koch’s House Of Ruin, Volume II at all. The question is — do I?

This new small paperback from Koch is, you see, a collection of drawings and nothing else — but it certainly…

I don’t know anything about cartoonist Brian Beaver, but so what? Maybe the contents of his recent self-published comics ‘zine From Beneath tell me all that I actually need to know.

“Let your work speak for itself,” they’ll tell you in art school (I think, at any rate, never having actually attended it myself), and Beaver certainly takes that advice to heart, as literally no one else speaks at all — and by “no one,” I mean any of his cast of characters, be they insectoid-lensed secret agents of unknown origin, or demonic intergalactic/interdimensional monsters of even more unknown origin — but that’s okay at the beginning, downright great by the time things really get going, and flat-out inspired when all said and done. In fact, dialogue or captions would really just get in the way here.

Beaver’s linework is stunning in terms of its detail and fluidity, and…

With his long-awaited Constitution Illustrated  having just been released by Drawn+Quarterly (which I would expect you’ll be able to see a critique of here on this site in the near future, given that I already reviewed the “preview” Constitution Illustrated Sampler mini), you’d think cartoonist R. Sikoryak would be busy enough, but apparently not — and hey, who doesn’t have a few spare minutes to trash our repugnant and incompetent current president, anyway? Here’s the rub, though — are you really “trashing” old, fat, syphilitic, orange, impotent, misogynist, and bigoted if you’re just quoting his own words?

Like his large-format (and also D+Q-published) The Unquotable Trump, Sikoryak isn’t “making anything up” but the illustrations in his new follow-up mini The Impeachable Trump, which he self-published in the “early days” of this pathetically mismanaged coronavirus pandemic. As the cover itself states, these are more of Donnie Dumbshit’s “best…

Hearkening back to the underground science fiction epics of everyone from George Metzger to Matt Howarth, to the more contemporary efforts of ambitious cartoonists like Joshua Cotter, Josh Frankel’s new self-published comics ‘zine (and that’s the right word — this is a magazine-sized publication that clocks in at 40 pages) Eccentric Orbits is nevertheless something new, different, and frankly pretty unique : a human-sized and often quite light-hearted and, dare I say it, fun take on tried and true genre tropes that draws you in immediately with the superb quality of its illustration and keeps your interest by dint of its strong characterization. Not that the art doesn’t stay great from start to finish, too, mind you, because it most assuredly does.

Frankel’s teenage protagonists, part of the crew of the ingeniously-named space station Indiscretion, are both entirely typical of kids their age and fully-fleshed-out individuals, and whether they’re being…

It’s always a tricky proposition to know what to say about Jim Woodring’s work simply because the depth and scope of his creative vision is both deeper and wider than the ability of mere language — even superlative-laden language — to keep up with. Which, yeah, is a roundabout way of saying that so much has been said about him already that there’s now much new to say — but then he comes out with a new book, and you figure that it would be a shame to ignore it just because you’re bound to say “it’s great, you should buy it.” So we’ll get that part out of the way first and see where things take us.

To that end, then : Woodring’s got a new book out from Fantagraphics, a handsome  hardcover segmented into color-coded and thematically-linked pseudo-chapters called And Now, Sir – Is THIS Your Missing Gonad?