One thing no one can doubt for a minute : Ryan Callaway is a busy guy. Most years see him putting or two or three films, and here in 2019 he’s releasing his hour-long “short,” The Ghost In The Darkness, as well as the full-length effort under review here, One Winter Night, more or less simultaneously. Not even fellow New Jersey microbudgeter Nigel Bach can match that pace, and he doesn’t have anywhere near Callaway’s cast sizes and production complexities, given that he’s essentially cranking out everything from within the confines of his own home, and with himself as his only “star.”

Still, work ethic is one thing, actual ability something else entirely, and just because Callaway can pull off the seemingly impossible on a consistent basis doesn’t mean he always should. I got early access to this flick (which should be available for streaming on Amazon…

So, this is kind of interesting — New Jersey microbudget auetuer Ryan Callaway used to swear up and down that he’d never touch the “found footage” sub-genre, and yet here we are, in late 2019, and apparently “never say never” is the order of the day because his latest, The Ghost In The Darkness, fits that beleaguered category to the proverbial “T.” So the question we have to ask ourselves, I suppose, is : now that he’s “gone there” — should he have?

You can decide for yourself if you’ve got Amazon Prime, since this has recently been made available for streaming there, but if you want my opinion (which I’ll take as a given seeing as how you’re visiting this site and all), I’d say that based on just over an hour of evidence (which qualifies this as a “short” by Callaway standards),  the necessary restrictions imposed upon…

My reading selection of books released this past Wednesday offers no real thematic connection to stitch together — no preponderance of first issues, no mix of firsts and lasts, nothing like that — so we’re just gonna get totally random with this week’s “capsule review” selections, and the verdicts for each are, likewise, all over the map —

Forcing a “milestone” label onto a book that’s been around for, like, less than two years seems a bit of a reach, but Marvel is no doubt eager to capitalize on the runaway critical and commercial success of The Immortal Hulk, and so #25 has indeed been marketed as some sort of “landmark” issue, and saddled with the extra pages and $5.99 price tag that comes part and parcel with such a purported “occasion.” Fortunately, cash-grabs don’t come much better than this stand-alone “cosmic” story that bears distinct echoes to Alan…

I’ve been meaning to get some more Manga into the mix on this site, and fortunately for me (and, by extension, you) Black Hook Press is more than happy to accommodate by means of their very solid critical outreach efforts — to say nothing of the consistently-noteworthy physical packages they put together for their expertly-curated releases.

Take, for instance, their latest — a long-overdue (for Western audiences, at any rate) collection of the early-to-mid 1970s autobio strips by pioneering master of the form Shinichi Abe entitled That Miyoko Asagaya Feeling, edited and assembled by Mitsuhiro Asakawa (who also provides a superb biographical essay) and translated by all-around Manga renaissance man Ryan Holmberg, whose association with any project marks it as being worth a purchase. The material presented herein has largely flown beneath the North American radar, but as far as making up for lost time goes, something tells me…

Annie Koyama’s “farewell tour” wouldn’t be complete without one more release from Michael DeForge before Koyama press closes up shop, and while his latest, Stunt, may not qualify as a “book” so much as a stretched-out (in terms of its page count and physical dimensions) Chick tract, it’s certainly as thematically and conceptually dense as any of this one-time-ingenue cartoonist’s previous works, and further reinforces the almost giddily-obsessive nature of the psychosexual and physical terrors that are congealing and coagulating into something very much like a core “portfolio” of concerns at the heart of his overall artistic project.

Roll call : duality, the amorphous nature of identity, bondage and submission (both mental and physical), Cronenbergian body horror, fame and celebrity, overwhelming sexual need, personal apocalypse, and fluidity as the only constant.

Among other things, of course, but those are the big ones.

Rendered in blacks, whites, and blues that…

Over the course of the past few years, I’ve been of a mind that Simon Hanselmann should dump Megg, Mogg, Owl, and the rest of the gang and do something different. Move forward. Push himself to expand his horizons by letting go of the familiar.

On a purely technical level, he’s definitely been honing his craft — his cartooning has become more precise and refined, while his painting has graduated from the “impressive” to the “magnificently rich and detailed” — but in a larger sense, I felt that he’d been every bit as stuck as his ensemble cast, all this aesthetically-proficient work wasted on dead-end narratives about characters who, by design, were never going to amount to shit. Sure, Megahex was masochistic fun, but Megg And Mogg In Amsterdam was largely more of the same, only in Amsterdam, while One More Year was, well, one more year. I get that…

Last month’s release of Patrick Kyle’s The Death Of The Master from Koyama Press was both an auspicious and somber occasion — auspicious because it marked the ambitious fleshing-out of a self-published mini into a 244-page “graphic novel” of remarkable texture and character, somber because it meant the end of the road for an exceptionally fruitful relationship between cartoonist and publisher that’s offered readers a privileged glimpse at the upward trajectory of the former’s artistic development with the latter’s full faith and support every step of the way. We’re all going to miss Annie Koyama’s publishing efforts when she fully transitions into “patronage mode” after next year, it’s true, but no one will miss her more than the talented people she’s shepherded from “promising newcomer” to “fully-formed, utterly unique creator.”

Certainly last year’s Roaming Foliage offered lead pipe-cinch evidence that Kyle had completed that trek from point A to point…

We have three first issues and one last issue to go over this week and so, in the spirit of taking last things first —

A mercy killing that arrives three issues too late, Frank Miller and John Romita Jr.’s Superman : Year One #3 exits the world the same way it came in — with no clear idea of its reason for being and no coherent plan to at least fool us into thinking it has one. Miller’s script changes narrators frequently but tone never, Romita’s art is up and down and seriously down when it’s down (a splash near the end of this one features arguably the worst Wonder Woman illustration I’ve ever seen in my life), and precisely why this non-canonical revisionist take on Superman’s origin even exists is, at this point, anyone’s guess. It doesn’t count for anything, it only plays around with surface-level details of…

For nearly two decades, celebrated comics auteur Charles Burns has been occasionally self-publishing a “secret” ‘zine that he gives away to — I dunno, a select few people in his “inner circle,” I suppose is the best way to define it. Friends, fellow cartoonists, for all I know maybe even the occasional critic. Not that I’m one of them, mind you, but despite never landing a copy personally I’ve certainly heard tell about it — a “process ‘zine” of sorts, featuring everything from rough sketches to finished drawings, some of which make their way into Burns’ widely-released work, most of which don’t. It’s called Free Shit, and now the entirety of its contents (as far as I know, at any rate) have been made available to the unwashed masses via a nice little digest-sized hardback published by Fantagraphics.

On first flip-though — as well as subsequent ones — it…

Long before there was Jerry Springer, there was William Gropper.

Which isn’t, believe it or not, to say that the two men have much of anything in common : Gropper was a masterfully skilled cartoonist and fine artist, Springer a cheap carnival barker who profited on the exploitation of his guests’ misery, but they both milked the notion of the so-called “love triangle” for all it’s worth — it just so happens that the premise is worth a whole lot more in the hands of a sympathetic and smart illustrator than it is a sleazy talk show host.

I’m guessing that this assertion requires little by way of concrete evidence, but just in case, New York Review Comics has recently issued a handsome hardcover edition of Gropper’s largely-forgotten 1930 sequential story Alay-Oop, a book that may just be able to stake a legitimate claim to being the first so-called…