In my time, I’ve certainly reviewed some strange comics for this site (and others), but few have left me as legitimately perplexed as Black Budget #1, the self-published debut issue of what appears to be an ongoing series by the pseudonymous Folie a Deux — a guy who certainly wears his heart on his sleeve in that he’s unafraid to put his conspiratorial worldview and personal sexual fetishes out there for all to see. And while I always salute cartoonists willing to “bare all” in the metaphorical sense, my admiration for their fearlessness and/or obliviousness doesn’t extend so far as to give their work a free pass. You want a positive review out of me? You’ve gotta earn it on the page.

That’s all well and good, of course, but what’s especially tricky to determine about this comic is whether or not it does, in fact, “earn it.” On…

Fieldmouse Press, the new non-profit comics publishing entity founded by myself and fellow critics Rob Clough, Daniel Elkin, and Alex Hoffman, is pleased to announce the launch of its fundraising drive to help finance our inaugural 2020 publishing season via donate.ly. Your support is greatly appreciated, and all donations are tax-deductibe.

For more information, please visit https://pages.donately.com/fieldmousepress/campaign/help-fieldmouse-press-launch-its-2020-season

To absolutely no one’s surprise, DC is cashing in big on the success of the new movie Joker with an unconscionably over-saturated slew of Joker-centric comics — as well as plenty of Bat-crap that doesn’t feature the so-called “Clown Prince Of Crime” — so let’s take a look at the attendees at this week’s cash-grab party, as well as one more item of interest —

Okay, so I was lying when I said Joker/Harley : Criminal Sanity #1, the newest offering in the veritable onslaught of books coming out by way of DC’s “Black Label” imprint, was an “item of interest.” In point of fact, popular YA author Kami Garcia’s script, which re-imagines Harley as a criminal profiler and Joker as a standard-issue serial killer, is so clumsily written and embarrassingly verbose as to be well-nigh unreadable, while “flashback” sequence illustrator Mike Mayhew’s art is so heavily photo-referenced as to…

If there’s one cartoonist that learned scholars of the comics medium — and even the occasional opinionated asshole such as yours truly — wishes we could see more work from, it’s James Romberger. His understanding of the unique potential and possibilities inherent to sequential storytelling is on par with the likes of Mazzuchelli or Krigstein, yet when pressed, most of my fellow critics will cop to being familiar with his stunning graphic adaptation of David Wojnarowicz’s Seven Miles A Second, and that’s about it.

Which isn’t a bad thing to be known for by any means — quite the reverse — but for whatever reason, subsequent and occasional works such as Post York and Aaron And Ahmed didn’t rock the comics community to its collective core in the same fashion. Which is a damn shame, because they’re both outstanding books that deserve to be just as widely known, studied…

A heady mix of of the explicitly alien, the vaguely Aztec, the less-vaguely Navajo,  and the even-less-vaguely-than-that Blackfeet, Missoula, Montana-based cartoonist Theo Ellsworth creates totem pole art on paper by way of some interdimensional bridge to realms unknown, and the influence of native peoples makes its presence as surely felt in his narratives as it is in his illustrations, centered as they often are on rites of passage that are tribal in origin, but transposed into a very, even obsessively, personal setting. His 2015 Mini Kus! offering (#35 in the series), Birthday, is no exception, and may just represent the surest and most concise distillation of his overall artistic project as just about anything he’s done.

And speaking of obsessiveness, Ellsworth utilizes every last micro-millimeter of every panel on every page, his highly-detailed drawings a kaleidoscopic exorcism (one of his books, also published by Kus! and reviewed on…

We might as well make it clear at the outset, not that there’s probably much doubt : no, This No Place To Say (published in 2013 and bearing #18 in the Mini Kus! series on its spine — errr, okay, back cover) isn’t by that Michael Jordan — this one’s a German neo-surrealist cartoonist with an Eraserhead-era Lynchian sensibility and an apparent predilection for colors that fall roughly in the “mustard” range. I tried to get to this one (as well as the next comic I’ll be reviewing, Theo Ellsworth’s Birthday) during Kus! theme week at the end of September, but time ran out on me, so — better late than never?

The subconsciously-channeled narrative here involves a stand-in for the author falling through his coffee cup into a densely bureaucratic medical facility carved into the side of a mountain, where he may or may not require treatment…

And we’re back! After taking a month (-ish) off to finish some other writing projects (including my first-ever comic book story!) while still keeping my “regular” review schedule on track, the Round-Up is ready to get off the mat, dust itself off, and step back into the ring! As is Michel Fiffe, so let’s get to that first —

Copra (Vol. 2) #1 is the 32nd issue of the formerly-self-published series, as the cover signature makes clear, but what could be a lot more clear is just what the fuck is happening — for new readers, at any rate. And there should be plenty of those given that new publisher Image Comics has a much greater “reach” than a Brooklyn cartoonist toiling away on his own. Which isn’t to say that there’s not a nice recap of all that’s come before on offer in this 36-page debut issue (a real…

In the spirit of fairness from the outset, Mat Brinkman’s recently-reissued Kap Trap is a fascinating, if curiously uneven, beast — but here’s the more significant part of the deal : as a historical artifact, it’s absolutely invaluable.

Nearly 30 years old now, this early-days effort from a future founding member of the legendary Forth Thunder collective shows a cartoonist in fairly full possession of all his artistic faculties right out of the gate, even if it’s a little more tentative in terms of its execution than later efforts such as Teratoid Heights or Multiforce.  The  line from the one to the others is fairly clear, however — and I defy you to find  another cartoonist who had this clear and singular a vision of what they were looking to accomplish at age 18. Or at least another one not named Tillie Walden, who likewise arrived on “the…

The task facing Josh Bayer’s new Tinto Press comic, Black Star, is both twofold and daunting : to add depth, texture, and significance to the “main work” it refers back to and, in a very real sense, occurs within — that being the just-reviewed Theth : Tomorrow Forever  — and to justify its own existence as an individual, self-contained work.

Which, for the record, it isn’t — but that needn’t necessarily prevent it from functioning as one. If you’re confused by this review right about now, that’s okay — if you’re confused by the comic itself, considerably less so.

Adapted from the classic Dick Briefer Frankenstein story “The Faceless Monster,” this richly-drawn (and even more richly-colored) book is also a “book-within-a-book,” a meta-textual narrative sprung from the mind of Theth “himself” metaphorically, his creator literally — and one that calls into question to an even greater degree the separation…

A tidal wave of memories real and imagined, meticulously haphazard (here we go with the contradictions) pencil, pen, and brush strokes, kaleidoscopic colors, steam-of-consciousness observations, mixed genre tropes, and weighty foreboding, Josh Bayer’s latest Tinto Press-published comic/”graphic novel,”  Theth : Tomorrow Forever, may be a sequel to its shorter-titled 2014 predecessor literally and thematically, but it’s also very much a “stand-alone” work — and one that leaves a pretty damn indelible mark upon the reader, at that.

Most of us have been where protagonist/authorial stand-in (to one degree or another) Theth finds himself in Columbus, Ohio circa 1990 : 20 years old, at loose ends, burning to make a mark upon the world, unsure of what form that mark should — or even could — take, the future appearing equal parts formless void and open wound. It’s probably trickier for those with an artistic inclination to navigate this period…