Just about any and every artist that ever lived has been plagued with periods of self-doubt and creative bankruptcy, but the truly ingenious among them have found  ways to use those dark times as inspiration — after all, if you can’t rise above it, why not explore it for all it’s worth? It seemed like every book Stephen King wrote for a good decade or more was about a writer who had hit a brick wall, and cartoonists like Robert Crumb and Joe Matt have literally built their careers around unflattering portrayals of what happens (or doesn’t happen) when their creative wellsprings run dry.

This is all minor-league stuff, though, compared with manga legend Yoshiharu Tsuge’s The Man Without Talent, the unflattering self-portrait to end all unflattering self-portraits, largely because it eschews any sort of overt plays for sympathy in favor of a raw, unvarnished, sometimes even dispassionate examination…

I’ll be the first to admit that most weeks these Round-Up columns are just my way of keeping up with what’s happening in the comics mainstream, and truth be told my “pull list” is so small compared to that of many of my readers that I often have a difficult time finding four books that I even feel like talking about. This week was a glorious exception, however — one of those weeks where yeah, I maybe spent a little too much, but I was reminded of why I even stick with the ritual of heading down to my LCS on Wednesdays in the first place. Yeah, we all know that small-press comics are cool, but ya know what? The “Big Two” and the major indies still put out some damn good stuff too, and this week they hit us with four first issues that are well worth anyone’s time…

Ah, bliss. Ever since a collected volume of cartoonist extraordinaire John Pham’s beloved strips featuring hard-luck “lovable losers” Jay and Kay was released in France a couple of years ago, English-speaking audiences have been waiting for  a version we can actually, ya know, read — but the demand for it was so strong that I truthfully know a few people who ordered the French version just to look at the thing.

It’s easy enough to see why — Pham’s cartooning skill is matched only by his artistry with the risograph, a printing method that he stands as one of the absolute masters of, and who are we kidding? Each issue of his self-published Epoxy sells out so quickly, despite its high price, that for many people these are comics they’ve only heard about in reverent near-whispers to date, but have never actually seen outside of, say, Kramers Ergot. Well…

Hailing as she does from Stockholm, Sweden, Moa Romanova’s name isn’t one that is particularly well-known here in the US — but I have a distinct feeling that her Fantagraphics-published debut graphic novel, Goblin Girl, is going to change all that in a hurry. Toeing a tightrope-line between pure autobio and fictionalized faux-memoir, with the distinction between which “parts” of the book are which never being explicitly delineated, this is a seamless and powerful work that navigates the always-choppy waters of mental illness with raw honesty, emotion, and a sense of authenticity so profound that it almost doesn’t even matter how much of it is derived from Romanova’s daily life or not.

That being said, she’s still clearly finding her voice as a cartoonist, at least on the artistic side of the ledger : her panel layouts, lettering, backgrounds, color choices, and caricature-ish flourishes owe a lot to…

We might get an extra day this year, and it might even be today, but there were still only seven days this week — don’t ask me how that works. In any case, there was a hell of a lot that hit LCS shelves this week, and I’ve chosen four brand-spanking-new debuts to give the once-over, so here they are, arranged in descending order of quality —

Tomorrow #1 comes our way courtesy of editor Karen Berger and her Berger Books imprint at Dark Hose, and teams veteran scribe Peter Milligan with artist Jesus Hervas, continuing this line’s interesting pattern of pairing the old with the new. Milligan, for his part, used to be one of the most interesting and radical writers in the business — Enigma still ranks among my top ten comics of all time —but he’s been a pretty serious hit-or-miss proposition in recent years, with certain…

When you give your autobio comics project an expansive title, you’re either pretty damn confident that elements of the universal are plainly on offer in the everyday routines of your life, or you’re just delusional. New Orleans-based cartoonist Kyle Bravo has been at it for awhile now, so if he’s delusional, he’s doing a damn good job of hiding it, but based on the evidence offered in his latest self-published mini, Forever & Everything #5, that was probably never a serious concern, anyway. Rather, he does a really nice job of finding something borderline-transcendent in the mundane, and the only thing deliberately grandiose is — yup, that name.

Still, if the shoe fits, right? Naturally, one of the first people you think of when you think of “this sort of thing” in a general sense is Jeffrey Brown, and his influence on the way Bravo structures his strips is fairly…

When you boil the art of cartooning down to its basic elements, you sometimes end up creating work that reminds people just why they love this medium so much in the first place — provided your sensibilities as an artist are sound to begin with, of course. When it comes to Karen Sneider, that’s something you literally never have to worry about; sensibilities come no more sound than hers.

Sneider’s latest self-published mini, Diary Of A Monster, is as immediately bizarre as it is inarguably recognizable, imbued with a kind of universal populist appeal that guarantees almost anyone will find it funny by doing something simple and timeless throughout : putting weird characters in everyday situations and finding a kernel of humor in all of them that’s easy to relate to and well-timed in its placement. The kind of thing that makes you think to yourself while you’re reading…

Once in awhile, you have one of those weeks that reminds you why you love going to the comic shop on Wednesday — assuming, that is, that you actually do go to the comic shop on Wednesday. If you do, here are some things that you may have picked up. If you don’t, here are some things that you may (or may not, your call) want to pick up next time you’re there —

Going back to the Marvel Zombies rip-off well, writer Tom Taylor revisits his breakout hit concept of last year (one of the few to come from DC in recent memory) with DCeased : Unkillables #1, the debut intstallment of a three-part series that shows what the villains got up to while the heroes were all (okay, mostly) getting either wiped out or fucked by Darkseid’s infamous Anti-Life Equation being unleashed on Earth and turning everyone affected…

Apparently in the works for several years before its debut at CAB late last year (at least if the catalogue number attached to it by its publisher, Retrofit/Big Planet, is to be believed — and why wouldn’t it be?), it’s perhaps easier to define Andrew Lorenzi’s visionary graphic story cycle, Multo, by what it isn’t rather than what it actually is — taken as a whole the work has a distinct rhythm, but not a progression; it’s not strictly a work of comics poetry, but its overall effect is poetic; and while it’s technically a memoir, most of the incidents it depicts have an ethereal, dreamlike quality to them.

Showcasing Lorenzi’s multi-faceted talents along a stylistic continuum nearly as broad as that of cartoonists such as Tommi Musturi or Karl Stevens, this generously (and necessarily) oversized volume relates its autobiographical contents by means of painting, embroidery…

It’s not every day that a long-form comics project (or, if you like, a “graphic novel”) gets its own separately-published postscript, much less one that takes the form of an eight-page mini comic presented in full color whereas the book it refers back to is in black and white — but we live in unusual times, as evidenced by the fact that I’m even reviewing an eight-page mini in the first place.

That being said, fellow Twin Cities resident Lance Ward has lived through much stranger times than these during his periods of addiction and subsequent recovery, and some of those are chronicled in The Truth Behind Blood And Drugs, the rather quickly-issued “epilogue” of sorts to last year’s celebrated Blood And Drugs that comes our way courtesy of the same publisher, J.T. Yost’s Birdcage Bottom Books. And while I’m not prepared to go so far as to call…