Walker Tate’s comics have a way of clinging in the back of your mind and staying there for extended periods — and given that this is the second of his works I’ve reviewed in the past week or so (the other being his most recent, Cloggel, the cover of which appears at the bottom of this review as a friendly reminder for you to, ya know, buy it), you can safely surmise that they’ve been clawing their way to the forefront of mine in recent days. And so they have. This is largely down to the fact that they lend themselves to careful consideration, as you’ve no doubt guessed, but they just as surely eschew immediate interpretation and classification, instead going the slow-burn route of conceptual percolation, for lack of a better term, until the reader finally either has a “Eureka!” moment or, more likely, achieves a kind of…

What the hell is this, anyway? A review of a four-page mini? Am I nuts?

Well, yeah, I am — but that’s nothing new. What is new is the idea that there could, indeed, be a four-page mini worth devoting more than a quick 150-word paragraph to talking about, but such is indeed the case with Abby Jame’s latest from Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club, Lizard Daddies. I don’t expect this to happen too often, mind you, but Jame’s work is always worthy of examination on some level, and this one touches on so many relevant cultural themes in so few pages that the word “extraordinary” comes to mind pretty quickly and easily.

The set-up here is as immediately grabbing as one would assume it to be : a group of teenage girls decide to attend a “sugar daddy/sugar baby” party to fleece some cash out of some horny old…

Sam Spina is one of those cartoonists who never strayed too far from his DIY roots — and for that, we should all be thankful.

You never know when one of his new self-published minis is going to hit, nor what it’s going to be about, but you can be sure of a couple things without fail : whatever he comes up with is going to be funny, and it’s going to make you think just a little bit, too. These are both good things, of course, but lots of comics manage to do them — what sets Spina’s work apart, then, is a little something extra that we’ll just call, for lack of a better term, charm.

Which, if we’re being honest, is a well-nigh impossible thing to quantify and is entirely subjective in the extreme, but still — you know it when you see it, and you’re…

Looks like we’re back on the first issue train in a big way this week — even if one of them’s a one-shot. And since that one-shot is the comic that everyone is talking about right this very moment, that’s where we’ll start things off —

Frank Miller goes back to the well (that’s been rather unwell) with Dark Knight Returns : The Golden Child #1, presented in the old school “Dark Knight Format” that it pioneered (this time under DC’s Black Label imprint), with sumptuous art from the criminally under-utilized-in-recent-years Rafael Grampa, who’s infused his sleek, cinematic style with a little bit more Dave Cooper-esque physical “ripple” than we’ve seen from him in the past while maintaining the overall aesthetic of his Geoff Darrow-by-way-of- Moebius roots. The result is a book that looks absolutely gorgeous and earns a “buy” recommendation for the art alone, with the generally fun…

Truth be told, Walker Tate is one of those cartoonists whose would I damn well should have covered by now, but with the release of his latest self-published comic, Cloggel, now’s as good an occasion as any to make up for lost time — and, conveniently enough, for readers new to Tate’s work, this book provides more or less the perfect introduction to his genuinely iconoclastic artistic vision.

No less an authority than Austin English has said that Tate carries on in the tradition of the great John Hankiewicz, and while I’m not here to argue with that, I’d like to point out that his clean-line style and sparse, economic scripting also bring to mind latter-period Ditko, yet if he’s carved something of a middle ground between those two artists, it’s one all his own, as his comics pay not even so much as lip service or a hat-tip…

Ten years is a pretty healthy amount of time to stick with anything, especially a labor of love that probably doesn’t bring you in much (if any) cash, but comics writer/self-publisher Jonathan Baylis has manged to do just that and the latest issue of his now long-running series, So Buttons #10, marks a decade in the trenches, telling stories about his life, as well as events, people, and places adjacent to it. And whaddya know? It might just be his best to date.

Before we delve into the contents too deeply, it’s probably worth remarking upon the fact that Baylis has proved the naysayers who initially dismissed him as a Harvey Pekar clone wrong — yeah, he does things the way ol’ Harv did, hiring freelance cartoonists to draw his short vignette-style strips, but that’s about where the similarities end, as Baylis has cultivated a voice and perspective all his…

Here it is, the final “top ten” list in our year-end wrap, and probably the one people are most interested in. Books in this category are comprised of all-new material, never serialized in single issues or online, and constructed specifically for the so-called “graphic novel” format. And your “winners” are —

10. Blood And Drugs By Lance Ward (Birdcage Bottom Books) – A visceral, harrowing firsthand account of addiction and recovery on the social and economic margins by a cartoonist with a busted hand. One of the most immediate and unmediated works in recent memory, this one will leave an indelible mark on your brain.

9. The Structure Is Rotten, Comrade By Viken Berberian And Yann Kebbi (Fantagraphics) – Exploring architecture and gentrification as inherently political topics, this exquisitely-illustrated book has much to say about damn near everything,  yet never feels like a treatise or lecture. There’s nothing rotten about…

We’re inching closer to being done with our monstrous year-end wrap, and with this, our next-to-last list, we’ll be taking a look at my top ten “special mentions” — that is, projects that have to do with comics, or are by cartoonists, but aren’t precisely comics per se in and of themselves. The term I settled on some time back was “comics-adjacent” works, and until something better comes to mind, I’m sticking with it. And so —

10. Folrath #3 By Zak Sally (La Mano 21) – The third and final “volume” of Sally’s riso-printed prose memoir of his life on the social, economic, and cultural margins in the early 1990s ably demonstrates that he’s every bit as gifted a writer as he is a cartoonist. I hated to see this end, but loved every page of it.

9. Bubbles #4 Edited By Brian Baynes (Self-Published) – Baynes came out…

After this, we’ve got two year-end lists to go — but we haven’t even done this one yet, so perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. My definition of “contemporary” collections is anything published from the year 2000 right up to the present day, and while many of the books that follow may very well fit your — or even my — definition of a “graphic novel,” the fact is that if they were originally published as serialized works, either in comics titles of their own or as part of anthologies, or if the strips presented in these books were culled from sources various and sundry, then this is the category they fall into by my entirely-unofficial rules. And with that, away we go —

10. The Sleep Gas By Chris Cajero Cilla (Fantagraphics Underground) – The spiritual successor to the likes of Doug Allen and Gary Leib, this welcome collection…

Another day, another year-end “top ten” list. This time out is the year’s best vintage collected editions, in this case “vintage” meaning that the books in question collect works originally published prior to the year 2000. One of these years I suppose I should push that “cut-off date” up a bit, but for now, we’ll play it as it lays. And so, without further ado —

10. Alay-Oop By William Gropper (New York Review Comics) – Arguably the first graphic novel ever published, Gropper’s 1930 wordless morality play/love triangle drama is a tour de force of fluid visual storytelling, and the fact that it’s now available for contemporary audiences to re-discover is nothing short of a miracle.

9. That Miyoko Asagaya Feeling By Shinichi Abe (Black Hook Press) – A trailblazer in the field of autobio Manga, Abe’s early-1970s GARO strips are a moving testament to the power of inspiration…