Oh, hell yes.

The first volume of Lale Westvind’s Grip was one of the standout releases of 2018, a rapturous visual feast that paid tribute to working women everywhere — particularly women working in the trades — but with our nameless protagonist having triumphed against external foes, in the recently-released Grip Vol. 2 she turns her whirlwind “super-hands” to the task of transcendence through construction. And, as you’d no doubt expect, it’s a very formidable task indeed.

Once again, Perfectly Acceptable Press knocks it out of the park with their artisan riso printing, federal blue, fluorescent red, and yellow gradations exploding off the page with the same guts and gusto as every panel in Westvind’s wordless 88-page story, which functions as both sequel and necessary counter-balance to the fist “chapter,” antagonists that demanded a firm physical and theoretical beat-down now giving way to the probably more challenging, but if anything…

With my top ten single issues of 2019 in the rear view mirror, let’s move on to the top ten ongoing series. Any comic that saw two or more issues released in the past calendar year is eligible in this category and so, as you’d no doubt expect, the mainstream is represented much more on this list than it was in the last, given that most of their titles are still, theoretically, on a regular production schedule. There are a couple of elephants in the room that I’ll address at the very end, but let’s worry about that after you’ve read the “countdown,” shall we?

10. Wasted Space By Michael Moreci And Hayden Sherman (Vault Comics) – The first of two ensemble cast sci-fi series where every member of said ensemble is an asshole to make the “best of” cut this year, Moreci’s scripts for this book are heavy on the…

It’s that time of the year — specifically, the end of it. Or near enough, at any rate, for my purposes — those “purposes” being to survey the comics landscape and pick my favorites from 2019’s slate of offerings. As per the norm, I’ll be dividing things up into a veritable boat-load of different categories — top ten single issues (stand-alone comics, or ongoing projects that saw only one installment published in the last calendar year), top ten ongoing series (any comic series or “limited” series that saw two or more issues come out in 2019), top ten vintage collections (books presenting material originally published prior to the year 2000), top ten contemporary collections (books presenting material originally published after the year 2000), top ten special mentions (“comics-adjacent” projects such as ‘zines, books about comics, art books, prose and/or visual works by cartoonists that aren’t exactly “comics” per se…

Oversized, spiral-bound, and presented in a seismic flood of lavish riso-printed colors on exceptionally sturdy paper stock, Daria Tessler’s latest offering via artisan publisher Perfectly Acceptable Press, Loop Of The Sun, is a thing of beauty in the purely physical sense, it’s true — but as a self-contained sequential (though not strictly “comics” per se) story that  nevertheless fits comfortably within its creator’s larger ouevre, it stands out for both its thematic depth and transcendent visual auteurship. In other words, it may carry a $45 price tag, but there’s no doubt it’s worth every penny of that, and then some.

Tessler’s art has always existed at a self-created intersection between archaeology and alchemy, piecing together folkloric texts and historical artifacts in order to conjure something unique from disparate elements — and in this case, the subject being a creation myth from ancient Egypt proves to be…

At this point, Gabrielle Bell’s July diary comics are as tried-and-true a ritual as the bonding process between people and animals — so combining the two really only makes sense, doesn’t it?

That being said, as the asterisk on the cover of My Dog Ivy : A July Diary, her latest single-issue “floppy” from Uncivilized Books, makes clear, the titular golden retriever isn’t hers, but belongs to the Twin Cities couple she’s house-sitting for — whose identities should be easy enough to suss out with my having to say so, I would think. Not that Ivy is the only pet she’s charged to take care of, given that two cats are also “on the scene,” and not that watching after all these animals is the only thing that she has on her plate, given that there’s a garden to be tended, as well.

In any case, Bell’s facility…

Another interesting assortment of new “number ones” this week, beginning with a Ditko redux, followed by a Kirby pastiche. Shall we step through to the other side and have a look? Let’s do that —

After kind of a staggered roll-out to the line, DC is hitting us over the head with one Black Label comic after another these days, sometimes with two or three books bearing the imprint’s logo coming out in a single week. The latest is  The Question : The Deaths Of Vic Sage #1, featuring a return of the “classic” iteration of the character, set in his home turf of Hub City. It’s just plain great too see Denys Cowan and Bill Sienkiewicz teaming up again on pencils and inks, respectively, their stylish noir as gritty as ever, and Chris Sotomayor’s colors are good enough to fool you into thinking they’re not fucking computerized, but damn…

There’s nothing revolutionary, or even especially innovative, going on with Elise Dietrich’s recent (as of this November 2019 writing)  self-published mini Key West Diary — and, frankly, that’s one of the best things about it.

Over the years, autobio comics have undergone something of an evolution into memoir on the one hand, fist-person journalism/reportage on the other, but along the way something important’s been lost : something more personal, more isolated, more immediate. Which isn’t me bad-mouthing memoir or comics journalism in the least — quite the contrary, both are exciting “substrata” of the overall comic arts “foundation” — but the slice-of-life sans additional imperative, whether it comes in the form of a vignette or a longer-form story, sometimes feels as if it would be getting lost in the shuffle if it weren’t for the likes of Gabrielle Bell, John Porcellino, Jenny Zervakis, Keiler Roberts, et. al. keeping the torch…

There’s a lot of talk these days about comics as poetry (or at least more than there used to be), but E.A. Bethea’s ‘zine’s have been comfortably aligning themselves  within that classification for a long time — even if they they don’t, in and of themselves, present literal poems all that often per se. And while her latest self-published opus, Forlorn Toreador, is perhaps the most confident and assured distillation of her singular ethos yet, again there’s not a poem to be found within it, yet the sum total of its contents plays out very much like an extended one.

Alternating between emotive text pieces, full-page portrait illustrations, and Bethea’s trademark scrawled-with-heartfelt-precision comic strips, the book has a transitional fluidity to it that’s more intuitive than it is strictly explicit, more exploratory than it is declarative. Much of the work is tinged with a more than a hint…

Jeff Zenick’s art ‘zines are always an intriguing enigma, specializing as they do in portrait illustrations that tease out the essential truths of people, locales, and even eras with a kind of intuitive eye for what matters most — his heavy, thick line (often, it appears to this critic, rendered directly in ink, maybe even magic marker) accentuating the “macro” elements of a person’s facial features while downplaying, frequently even bypassing, the “micro” details that would benefit from, even require, a finer line. The result is a quietly breathtaking blend of “big picture” accuracy with singular expressionism, pictures of other people that are clearly and indisputably the product of one artist’s sensibilities.

What all this means is that Zenick is uniquely positioned to do something not too many can — tell a thematically and conceptually dense story while eschewing narrative altogether. He sells the scope of his ever-evolving project…

After a week off to attend the superb Short Run Comix & Arts Festival in Seattle, the Round-Up is back, and we’ve got four first issues to take a look at because, hey, every week at your LCS there are at least four “number ones,” if not more, are there not? It sure as hell seems like it —

First off, Joe Hill’s horror comics imprint at DC, Hill House, gives us The Dollhouse Family #1 by the veteran pairing of Mike Carey (here writing, for reasons unknown, under the pretentious moniker of “M.R. Carey”) and Peter Gross, joined this time out by the criminally under-utilized Vince Locke, who for my money has always been — and remains — one of the most distinctive artists working in the comics mainstream. Gross is credited with “layouts,” Locke with “finishes,” which means this looks to be about 75% Locke, at least, and…