I’ve really been digging Elise Dietrich’s self-published minis lately, and it’s not hard to see why : meticulous in her attention to detail and determined to pack as many visual “goodies” into every panel as possible, her cartooning nevertheless seems to easily dodge the pitfalls of rigid formality and instead expresses itself as a kind of fluid, nearly spontaneous, quiet series of expertly-communicated mediations on the little things that make life — well, life, I guess. Which probably seems like a counter-intuitive thing for me to say given that in last year’s small diary comics collection, Making Time, she adheres fairly strictly to four-panel grids, hits a requisite narrative “beat” in the middle of each strip, and generally ends ’em all on something that could at least be loosely interpreted as a “punch line.” But there you go — comics, especially good comics, can be kinda weird like that.

Having delivered intimate and unsettling portraits of his traumatic upbringing and struggles with mental illness in previous books such as Couch Tag and LOVF, it seems only natural that cartoonist Jesse Reklaw would take art as therapy a step further by doing daily diary comics — but as his late-2019 collection of them published by Fantagraphics Underground demonstrates, he’s chosen to go about the task in rather meticulous fashion, and hast taken its title, Keeping Score, absolutely literally.

Which, I mean, more power to him — diary comics are almost always therapeutic for their creators in one way or another, so why not come up with, say, a visual shorthand chart recording things such one’s medications, moods, and alcohol intake, as Reklaw has done here? If you’re gonna go in, you might as well go all in, otherwise why even bother? There’s no doubt about this particular cartoonist’s…

As near as I can tell, the events depicted in GG’s new book, Constantly (her last for Koyama Press and officially the first great comic bearing a 2020 copyright date) all take place within the confines of the apartment or house occupied by its nameless protagonist, but in a less literal — but more accurate — sense, they take place within her mind, her heart and, if you subscribe to the concept, her soul. And they’re happening to a lot or people a lot of the time.

If you’ve ever been friends with, or loved, someone who suffers from depression — or if you suffer from it yourself — the contents of this slim-but-undoubtedly powerful volume are sure to hit home, but odds are that even if your life has been unscathed by the effects of it in any perspective, you’ll at least gain some valuable insights into its actualities…

For the past few years (at least as far as I know), cartoonist Adam Meuse has been self-publishing highly eclectic collections of single-page strips that follow no particular set course other than where his Meuse (sorry, couldn’t resist) takes him, and the results,while predictably uneven, are also predictably unpredictable — and that alone makes them worth checking out. His latest, 2019’s Faults, continues this trend, yet it ups the ante by showing him not just following his sensibilities, but trusting them more implicitly — and as a result, his work is now flirting with “must-read” status.

At least by my accounting, at any rate — and since my opinions are in this driver’s seat around these parts (if nowhere else), that’s what matters here, right? Still, there’s no doubt Meuse has earned the accolades he’s receiving from me, his existential “riffing” on life’s absurdities now casting a fairy…

What I think : Dav and Roy, the two protagonists in cartoonist Drew Lerman’s Snake Creek, might be a stand-in for the author himself and a walking potato, respectively. What I know : Lerman wrote and drew one of these strips per day throughout 2018 and 2019, and now they’re all collected in a single — and singularly impressive — paperback that he’s having printed, and offering for sale, via Lulu. I also know that you should buy it. And now I’m going to tell you why.

In a very real sense, these strips follow a direct through-line that you can trace all the way back to George Herriman, but they’re also undoubtedly — as well as unclassifiably (not a real word, I know) — contemporary, despite largely dealing with timeless physical and metaphysical themes. There’s a simple and understated elegance to Lerman’s cartooning that is, above all, 

Understand that what I’m about to say is being applied to an imprint that’s published Greg Stump’s Disillusioned Illusions and Gerald Jablonski’s Farmer Ned’s Comics Barn, so yeah — when I “call out” Amy Lockhart’s Ditch Life as the weirdest comic to come out under the Fantagraphics Underground label? That’s no small feat right there, and means that  Lockhart’s beaten out some utterly bizarre and well-nigh unclassifiable “opposition.”

At first glance, though, this pastel-hued artistic paean to what we’ll call, for lack of a more readily-available term, “stylish minimalism” only appears kind of weird — but the lack of any sort of descriptive blurb on the back (on the hardback, to be specific — this thing actually boasts some pretty nice production values), the bizarre character designs, the appearance of a fold-out “board game” titled “Females As Furniture” about 2/3 of the way through the book’s 104 pages —…

This week’s “top-line” takeaway : two new Black Label debuts (or maybe that should be two more new Black Label debuts) from DC, and Dark Horse spirals into spin-off hell — but does it well? Let’s get right to it —

Horror novelist Carmen Maria Machado and Coffin Bound artist Dani collaborate on what’s got to be the most promising first issue yet from Joe Hill’s Black Label sub-sub-imprint, Hill House Comics, The Low, Low Woods #1 — and that’s pretty high praise when you consider that Hill and Leomacs’ Basketful Of Heads and Mike Carey, Peter Gross, and Vince Locke’s The Dollhouse Family have already come out of the gate damn strong. This one centers on a pair of young, queer girls of color trying their best to get by in the shithole mining town of Shudder-To-Think, Pennsylvania, which has been plagued by a constantly-raging underground coal fire…

Taking an experimental approach — visually, conceptually, thematically — to the well-trod ground that is memoir is no easy task, but weaving that experimentation into the metaphorical “DNA” of the work itself ups the ante considerably, and requires both sure-footed artistic skill as well as a fair amount of confidence in one’s vision form the get-go. As evidence for this assertion, I give you Paula Lawrie’s recently-self-published ‘zine My Geometric Family, a collection of single-page illustrations with accompanying text that bring to life formative experiences from the artist’s youth in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the added wrinkle of presenting everyone’s heads as a hodge-podge of various geometric (you saw that coming) shapes, thereby imbuing the proceedings with a pretty heavy layer of surrealism that both belies and accentuates their prosaic origins. Don’t ask me how that contradiction works itself out on the page, but it does…