If you read my review of Jeremy Rogers and C.J. Patterson’s Mondo Groovy issue one, you’ll recall that one of the things I appreciated most about that admittedly trashy — hell, deliberately trashy — comic was that it was totally un-pretentious and utterly lacking in both self-awareness, and awareness of the broader comics “scene” in general. And all of that goes double for its companion book, Mondo Groovy Horrorshow #1. And you kind of can’t help but tend to love this one, too.

Look, let’s be honest — normally a cartoonist has to be a fairly “known quantity” before they decide to try to monetize the contents of their old sketchbooks, but here’s Rogers, a fairly “unknown quantity” if ever there was one, doing it right the fuck now, before anybody has much of a clue who he is. Not because he seems particularly arrogant, mind you. Not because his…

So, yeah, my first thought when I got Mondo Groovy issue one — along with its companion comic, Mondo Groovy Horrorshow #1 — in the mail from cartoonist Jeremy Rogers was “these guys are trying too hard.” I mean, that title alone is just way too spot-on, right? You know this is probably going to be about a couple pothead dudes who are into trash cinema and don’t have much else going on. Maybe with a Fat Freddy’s Cat-type pet/sidekick thrown in for good measure.

And so it is. But here’s the thing : while it may, indeed, be every bit as obvious as it seems at first glance, and while it may be as all-over-the-map in terms of its effectiveness (or lack thereof) as any “gag humor” comic aimed squarely at the stoner crowd, it’s so damn unpretentious, and utterly lacking in fucks to give, that you can’t help…

Horror and humor are often a potent mix — as any fan of films like Frankenhooker or Street Trash can tell you (and, for the record, I’m “guilty” as charged on both counts) —but, more often than not, humor is the “senior partner,” if you will, in the pairing, largely because it’s easier to make someone laugh at atrocious shit than to show them how frightening the stuff we laugh at can actually be. A pure half-and-half serving of each is perhaps an even more rare thing to come by — and the challenge to create precisely that when you’re dealing with subject matter that delves into the existential ? Well, that’s a fairly stiff one indeed.

Still, it seems that’s the task Josh Simmons set for himself with his just-released mini Ghouls, a self-published series of single-panel cartoons that begins with an “abandon hope, all ye who enter…

We’ve all been there — you’re sitting on a plane, or a train, or a bus, and some nosy asshole plunks down next to you and starts asking all sorts of invasive questions, most likely because they’re both bored and boring. After all, when you haven’t got much of a life yourself, then you become unnaturally interested in the lives of others. But what if the person who started nosing around in your business had motivations beyond merely alleviating the tedium of their existence?

That’s the premise behind Josh Simmons’ latest self-published mini (well, okay, it’s only a “mini” in terms of length — as far as its physical format goes, it’s magazine-sized and offset-printed) Micky, an intense short story that plays to its artist’s strengths as the small press scene’s most accomplished purveyor of visceral horror. But the visceral only hits home as anything beyond…

The old saying goes that “you’re either on something, or you’re onto something” — and it seems as if Minneapolis cartoonist Peter Faecke might just be onto something with these “flip-book” split releases that he’s been doing, so after sharing the workload and cover space with A. T. Pratt for last year’s Wacky Western Double Digest, he’s back with a new dual release with one of my absolute favorite emerging cartoonists, Drew Lerman, this one focused on a detective story theme and bearing the admittedly unimaginative, but nevertheless apropos, title of Detective! Double Digest. So, yeah, it’s exactly what you think it is.

Especially if you think it’s going to be good, because this top-notch mini in certainly that. The two-color riso printing scheme employed by publishing imprint Really Easy Press is spot-on, the black/gray and pink gradations bringing the whimsical tone of both the stories and…

One of the more straightforward of Portland-based cartoonist Sean Christensen’s self-published minis — to say nothing of it also being perhaps the longest, clocking it at a whopping 60 pages — 2017’s Dress Rehearsal is both a figure study and a motion study, but is nevertheless an interpretative and fairly abstract formalist work on its own merits. Which sounds like me leading off on a contradictory foot, and so it probably is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an accurate and truthful summation of the work.

The bulk of the book, as you may have surmised by the cover, is an extended depiction of two people performing a nude dance — for, as it turns out, an appreciative audience — but there’s something more at play here than what can be seen on the surface. As the figures ebb and flow — working with, against, and sometimes in contradistinction to…

Consistently one of the more interesting artists working in the small press and self-publishing milieu, Portland’s Sean Christensen never fails to surprise and enthrall with his cartooning, and the latest of his works that I’ve managed to get my hands on (although I believe he actually self-published it last year), Questions Of Molten Motion, may be his most abstract and challenging ‘zine to date — an entirely wordless mini full of single-panel illustrations that convey fluidity in its various aspects, yet attempt to capture it by means of static and intransigent imagery, with most of his individual pen-and-ink drawings “hemmed in” by straight-rule lines at the top and bottom, but open at the sides.

Now, don’t ask me what the fuck some of these images actually depict in a concrete sense, although both bodies and loosely-rendered “objects” (after a fashion, at any rate) are reasonably inferred at the ocular…

To address the elephant in the room right at the outset, yes — Josh Pettinger and Evan Salazar’s new eight-page mini, Wimp Digest, is a “gimmick” comic, the stunt in question being that Salazar is writing and drawing a mildly embarrassing anecdote about Pettinger’s childhood, and Pettinger is writing and drawing a mildly embarrassing anecdote about Salazar’s childhood. Got that?

I’m sure you do, as the idea of one cartoonist telling the other a story for them to commit to paper, and the other doing the same, isn’t a terribly difficult conceit to grasp — nor is this comic itself a difficult one to kick back and spend about 15 minutes with. It’s a fun, kinda heartwarming, and certainly well-illustrated little number by two of the more promising new (-ish, at any rate) talents in the “indie”/self-publishing scene (although, as I’m sure you won’t be surprised to discover, the…

There’s truth in packaging, and then there’s this : Oakland-based cartoonist Mara Ramirez’s recently-released debut graphic novel, MOAB — which comes our way courtesy of Freak Comics — is formatted to look like a sketchbook/diary with a lush moleskine cover because, well, it is a sketchbook/diary with a lush moleskine cover, it’s just that it happens to tell one complete story. And one complete true story, at that.

I think, at any rate. Granted, there’s no indication that the narrative herein is strictly autobiographical — or even loosely autobiographical — but even if it isn’t, that doesn’t mean the story, and the emotive and expressive qualities that positively ooze from its metaphorical pores, is any less real. In fact, it only takes a few pages to clue readers in to the fact that this, right here, is as absolutely real as it gets.

And no sooner do I say…

After spending the last couple of years mainly re-visiting old material (as opposed to merely re-printing it, given that he’s made changes ranging from the significant to the less so to pretty much all his earlier comics in their new iterations), it’s nice to see that Minneapolis cartoonist David Tea is back to producing original stuff with Five Perennial Virtues #11, the latest issue of his intermittent self-published series that’s been going for, what? Nearly two decades now?

My, how time flies — even if, in Dave’s ‘zines, it seems to either crawl or loop back in on itself. Or both. In any case, the “Broken Pieces” subtitle for this issue is entirely apropos, and while tonally and structurally it’s of a piece (or, if you prefer, of a broken piece) with previous installments, it’s also quite different and fairly unique unto itself. Spoiler alert, then : I think you’re…