After knocking it out of the park with his flawless all-ages comic Yellow Flag Intelligence Squadron, cartoonist and self-publisher David King came back in the latter part of last year with a decidedly more — mature, I guess? — offering in the form of the magazine-sized Hercules And The Orbs Of Woad, a smartly contemporary take on the hero of ancient Greek mythology that takes what we know about the character to logical, if extreme, conclusions in service of something of an old-school illogical romp.

If that seems a bit vague, I apologize, and since I’d hate to be accused of tiptoeing around the issue, I’ll just lay it out in plain English : we all know that, like his daddy Zeus, Herc would pretty much fuck anything that moved, but what would happen if he got “blueballed”? If you’ve always wondered, here’s the answer you’ve been…

If there’s one comic that’s taken me a damn long time to wrap my head around, it’s Greg Stump’s singularly bizarre Disillusioned Illusions, originally self-published by the cartoonist in 2009 and later re-issued by Fantagraphics Underground in 2015. Folks are fond of saying that Seinfeld was a show about nothing, but this goes a step further — it’s a 356-page book about being about nothing.

Told via a strict, minimalist grid that shows its two principal characters (and later a third) in silhouette in front of a blank background with various inanimate objects and accessories making their way in and out of the narrative as necessary, each page is a short strip in and of itself in old-school “Sunday funnies” tradition, complete with either a concrete or vague “gag” ending, but — as with newspaper strips again — each builds upon the other to tell a long-form, overarching story…

One of those books that take all of 15 minutes to read, hours to look at, and days to fully absorb, it’s almost easier to catalogue what Niv Bavarsky and Michael Olivo’s handsomely-produced new Fantagraphics Underground hardback, Old Growth, isn’t about rather than what it is — but if we were about taking the easy way out around these parts, then this book wouldn’t find itself under the ol’ metaphorical microscope in the first place.  It’s a challenging and multi-faceted work, then — but it’s also cleverly disguised in such visually arresting and tonally “light” trappings that it doesn’t necessarily feel like anything other than an utter delight.

Don’t, then, let anyone tell you that fun and hard intellectual work are necessarily mutually exclusive, because they’re certainly not — but it’s well beyond interesting to note how Bavarsky and Olivo almost use the former to lull you into the…

Billing itself as a “micro graphic novella,” 2016’s Twin Bed was the first published cartooning from Paper Rocket Mini Comics proprietor Robyn Chapman in a good number of years, and there’s a fun air of formal experimentation to it throughout : the publication comes packaged in a paper “slipcase” illustrated to look like a quilt that the reader “uncovers” to get at the book itself, and the story is constructed as a series of roughly 100 single-panel-per-page images that feature a static background (that being a guy’s bedroom) with Chapman’s two unnamed protagonists positioned differently over/within said unchanging space. It’s a choice that no doubt saved the cartoonist a little bit of time when it came to drawing the thing, sure, but it’s also a bold and risky one — after all, if the narrative and the characters’ actions aren’t interesting, the whole thing could get pretty old pretty fast.

Back in the murky, distant past, one of the first reviews I did for this blog was a retrospective look back at Jess (then Jeff) Johnson’s Nurture The Devil, a short-lived series that continues to mystify and haunt me to this day, so it’s only fitting that I should also take a look at one of the late cartoonist/mixed-media artist/author’s final works, as well, I suppose — that being Forward Looking Statement, subtitled And Other Split Texts From The Evaporated Floor Of The Ill-Lit Bibliotheque, a decidedly experimental and idiosyncratic mini published back in 2014 by Robyn Chapman’s Paper Rocket Mini Comics that maps and limns a concrete physical reality (indeed, a structure) that is nevertheless impermanent in all ways and at all times.

Combining collage, found and/or appropriated text, diagrams, and sketches to make a kind of subtly bold statement about life and  and identity and…

If there’s one nominal “positive” to come from the current COVID-19 pandemic, it’s the fact that I’m getting a good chance to catch up on stuff I should have read, like, ages ago — although “read” isn’t exactly the word for Jess Rullifson’s Characters : Fifty Portraits Of Contemporary Cartoonists, a handsome full-color mini that was part of publisher Robyn Chapman’s 2014 Kickstarter for her Paper Rocket Mini Comics imprint and is a collection of portraiture done for a gallery show collected herein between two covers. Yes, I really am that late to the party.

That being said, wordless as the bulk of this particular ‘zine may be, it’s nevertheless a difficult item to review without resorting to some serious “inside baseball”-type referencing.  This is a nice-looking publication, to be sure, and Rullifson’s illustrations are well-rendered, emotive, and expressionistic — all very good things — but the project itself…

Somewhere in the inky depths of a dark, dank, foreboding dungeon, a fish head quite literally out of water finds itself trapped, and in desperate need of escape — will he/she/it make it?

This is the basic question at the heart of cartoonist Laurence Engraver’s 2018 Hollow Press-published Drippin’, a comic that takes absolutely full advantage of its format (obsidian-toned thick paper, dense white inks) and the sheer, enviable skill of its creator to tell a largely-wordless (barring the occasional animal sound effect) and exceptionally harrowing tale of survival against insurmountable odds. You think you know horror comics? This is a horror comic.

And by that I mean horrific to its core — from its dangling hooks to its murky passageways to its creaky wooden stairs to its vaguely Lovecraftian denizens, this book conjures an atmopshere — forgive me, but I’m going there again — dripping with a kind…

The name Evan M. Cohen is one that is unknown to me — but if his new Perfectly Acceptable booklet/’zine, Blind, is any indication, that’s my loss, because title aside, this thing is (sorry in advance) a real eye-opener. And surely this review can only go uphill from here —

Billed by its publisher as a “meditation on corporeality and creation, recollections recounted and reformed,” trust me when I say that only sounds oblique and borderline-esoteric — in truth, if you’re willing to absorb and fully consider these sequences of illustrations with an open mind and heart, what you’ll find here is one of the most disarmingly straightforward, unpretentious comics (a term that probably applies quite loosely in this instance) you’ll have been privileged to enjoy in quite some time.  And that word is key — enjoy.

I needn’t tell you that the production values of this book…

Originally conceived of and published back in 2015 but only recently making the rounds through some of the better “alternative” distros now, cartoonist Lex Rocket’s sturdy, riso-printed (although the cover may be offset?) mini, Mud Thief  Vol. 1, is at first glance an exercise in strict formalism, apportioned into three roughly equal-length segments — and while that’s not an inaccurate perception, it only scratches the surface. And if there’s one thing the erstwhile Mr. Rocket has crafted here, it’s a ‘zine of tremendous depth and complexity.

About the only thing I can think to compare it to is the early-days Chris Ware strip “I Guess” that ran in Volume 2, issue 3 of Art Spiegelman’s Raw, but even that head-to-head comes up short given that Ware was juxtaposing non-congruent, and trauma-based, text with deliberately-ironic superhero visuals, while Rocket is engaged in nothing so straightforward. Yeah, that’s right…