Described by writer/director Tony Pietra Arjuna as a “love letter to David Lynch,” 2019 Malaysian indie neo-noir thriller Shadowplay (now available to stream on Amazon and Vimeo — there’s probably a DVD and/or Blu-ray iteration to be found, as well, although I couldn’t comment on the specifics of such) certainly owes a stylistic debt to that eclectic auteur‘s work, particularly Mulholland Drive, but you’re likely to catch a fairly strong whiff of Gaspar Noe, Don Coscarelli, and even Orson Welles as the surreal, nearly free-associative narrative plays out herein, yet none of the heavy “borrowing” feels forced — nor, fortunately, does it prevent the end result from feeling reasonably fresh and original, if uneven.

Down-on-his luck P.I. protagonist Anton Shaw (played with a knowing wink and nod to classic cinematic gumshoes by Tony Eusoff) is haunted by incomplete memories of being kidnapped as a child — images of…

The last item under our metaphorical microscope for Kus! week is Mini Kus! #49, one of the more curious entries in a series that justly prides itself on curiosity and eclecticism, Martin Lacko’s MS Paint-rendered adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “purple prose” horror classic, The Call Of Cthulhu.

At first glance, this deliberately crude Cliffs Notes-on-crack truncation of a seminal text may seem irreverent in the extreme — Lovecraft and brevity don’t go together naturally, after all — but a closer examination reveals it to be anything but : by boiling the story down to its indivisible components, playing up its inherent absurdity, and completely neutering its forced “dark grandeur” before replacing it with a kind of (forgive the contradiction) light-hearted cynicism, it actually shows how endlessly inventive Lovecraft’s core ideas are under any circumstances.

Besides, for those of us interested in a dense and thoughtful consideration in comics…

As we wrap up Kus! week here in this musty, largely-hidden corner of the blogosphere (does anyone use that term anymore?), I thought I’d avail myself of the opportunity to shed and/or shine some light on a couple favorite Mini Kus! releases from recent years that haven’t received write-ups from yours truly in the past. So, I guess I might be making up for an egregious oversight or two on my part before we put this “theme week” to bed. First up : Yvan Guillo/Samplerman’s Bad Ball, #54 in the Mini Kus! line.

For those unfamiliar with Samplerman’s modus operandi/shtick, he “remixes” extant public domain comics panels — mostly from the so-called “Golden Age” — by digitally manipulating the drawings in various creative ways, inserting some of his own computer-generated (I’m assuming) images, and then shaking the whole thing up in a kaleidoscope and seeing what comes of it…

I’ve never had an overwhelming interest in botany, and certainly don’t have much of a green thumb (to the probable chagrin of my neighbors), so if a plant-based comics anthology (I know, I know — the choice of wording on my part there makes it sound more like a meal, or even an honest-to-goodness diet) is going to win me over, well — it’s going to have to work pretty hard. But while the theme may be of little import to me personally, S! Baltic Comics Magazine always is, and so I was more than willing to put my disinterest aside and give the venerable “digest-sized portable art gallery” series’ latest volume, entitled Plant Power, a go — and whaddya know, talk about proof positive that I need to broaden my horizons!

Lote Vilma Vitina, whose recent entry in the Mini Kus! line also focused on nature and…

The blacklight-and-neon-green cover to Bonkers, issue #35 of S! The Baltic Comics Magazine, a product of the imagination of Norwegian cartoonist Erlend Peder Kvam — who also provides one of the anthology’s strongest strips, a sing-song number that features a trio of anthropomorphic animal/space creature hybrids going about their largely-leisurely business with a spring in their step and a shared “hive-mind” between then — announces that the tightly-focused themes that most volumes of this series tether themselves to is pretty well out the window this time out, and that in its place we have an eclectic gathering of artists from around the globe quite literally letting it all hang out. All well and good, right?

But when you crack that cover open, things by and large get even better, as the “gallery-show-in-the-palm-of-your-hand” editorial remit the title has always lived and died by turns out to lend itself

Kevin Hooyman, of Conditions On The Ground renown, is a perfect choice for the Mini Kus! line — well-established as it is for providing a venue for individualistic, even idiosyncratic, artists to tell short-form stories (assuming they decide to even tell “stories” at all) — and his newly-released mini presented under the imprint’s imprimatur (okay, that was a bit redundant), Elemental Stars, may be #82 in the series, but damn if it won’t quickly become #1 in your heart.

In a dull pastel world populated by anthropomorphic animals/people/aliens/does it really even matter?, a group of neighbors that may or may not be actual “friends” search for the Crystal City that came to one one of them in dream — which may be no accident. Assuming such a city even exists, of course, and that is by no means a guaranteed proposition. But hey — the quest is the…

An instruction manual like no other, Chicago-based artist Lilli Carre’s  Open Molar (#80 in the ongoing Mini Kus! line) is at times as utterly indecipherable as an Ikea assembly guide, but infinitely more interesting and, most crucially, rewarding. But what you come up with at the end is still fairly well up for grabs.

Billing itself as teaching readers how to “create a drop-shape for slow relief,” with the caveats that “this solution is only intended for gapped interiors,” and that one should “not skip the first step,” it probably goes without saying that said first step is both the most obvious and the most unattainable, but I’m not about to “spoil” what it is here. It’ll have to suffice to know that how well and how thoroughly you’ve already mastered it will determine how far you go with subsequent instructions — not to mention (except, ya know, I am) 

In times past, I’ve gone the route of my Weekly Reading Round-Up columns to provide “capsule” reviews for new Mini Kus! releases, but this time around, the eclectic Latvian publisher’s most recent quartet of minis is so worthy of deeper consideration that I’m giving each a little more “breathing room” than the self-imposed word count of 250 that those short-form appraisals allow for. Granted, these probably won’t be the longest reviews you’ve ever seen on this site, but I’m actively working on brevity around these parts in general, so — let’s give it a go, shall we?

But wait, there’s more! I’ve also decided to review the two most recent volumes of Kus!’s venerable S! anthology, and to, by extension, give our Baltic friends the spotlight here at 4CA for the entire week. Or most of the week, at any rate, depneding on how things shake out. First up :…

If I had to guess — and I don’t, but I will — I’d surmise that the title for Haleigh Buck’s self-published (on nice heavy cardstock) 2018 (I think?) mini 0.03 refers to a particular size of pen tip . Probably a very tiny pen tip. But I could be wrong about that.

What I’m not wrong about is that this compact collection of illustrations was, in fact, drawn with some pretty tiny-tipped pens — and the detail in each of them is as staggering, even as unsettling, as the subject matter they explore. Roll call : death, skulls, demonic entities, random historical settings, nature, and more death. Picking up on a theme here?

This is seriously obsessive work, and I can only speculate on how much time was spent getting every aspect of every drawing exactly right. “A hell of a lot” may not be much of…