I admit : it took me a little bit of time to really appreciate the second issue of Brandon Lehmann’s self-published “solo anthology” series, Womp Womp. In my defense, though, despite never fully getting over the reservations I had (and still have) about it, I was at least able to put them aside long enough to get some good laughs out of it.

Cut from much the same mold as Michael Kupperman’s work of, say, a decade ago, Lehmann here serves up what’s largely a collection of single-page strips that feature hyper-realistic, yet almost pathologically mundane, static illustrations that are uniformly employed in service of pure set-up until the final panel’s glib, ironic “twist” ending. It takes some time to get on Lehmann’s wavelength here — he’s unwavering in his approach and you’ve gotta decide for yourself whether you’re willing to meet him on his “home turf” or just…

The exquisitely minimalist comics of Angela Chen are always a feast for the mind and eyes, and with two new ones hot off the press and/or Xerox machine (the other, Can’t Breathe Without Air, is pictured near the bottom of this review), now’s a great time to get on board the “Chen Bandwagon” (sorry, Angela, if you’re reading this) if you haven’t yet. We’ll be looking at both new releases in due course, but I flipped a coin and The Review won out as the one to go under my metaphorical microscope first, so let’s have at it:

A study in introversion expressed by extroverted means (hey, all art is), one’s first reaction to this eight-page mini may be that it’s a study in — or, if you prefer, a mass of — contradictions, but I’m not so sure that’s the case : yeah, it’s about negativity and its…

As a general rule, when a movie’s IMDB summary is scant on details, you know something’s up. I mean, whoever makes a film can go in there and write whatever blurb about it they want, and yet writer/director Benjamin Rider — the guy behind 2018 UK production Suburban Coffin — submitted only a cryptic, one-sentence description of the fruits of his labor (and 2,000 pounds of his money). Verbatim, it reads : “The devil, disguised as an insurance salesman, appears in the suburbs of London.”

Which, fair enough, is what this flick is about — but surely that can’t be all it’s about, can it?

Actually, uhhhmmm — yeah, it can. Clocking in at just over an hour, this is nevertheless a bit of a slow burn, and probably features a few too many characters for its own good. Alasdair Melrose turns in pretty solid work as Old Scratch himself…

Don’t look now, but it appears as though we’ve got a new “Seattle Dream Team” in the small press scene, as luminaries (in my book, at any rate) Sarah Romano Diehl and Brandon Lehmann step outside both their respective wheelhouses for the new collaborative effort, I Like Totally Know What You Did Last Summer, just released under Lehmann’s own Bad Publisher Books imprint. And while it’s entirely what you’d expect given its title, it’s nothing like you’d expect given the respective CV’s of each of the cartoonists involved.

Points, then, for truth in advertising and being something rather distinctive and new, then.

Survivors of the post-Scream “teen slasher” revival of the 1990s will have the premise for this one sussed, no doubt : a group of friends (five, to be specific) are desperate to cover up their involvement in a hit-and-run that left an innocent party dead, and…

The comics and ‘zines of Jason T. Miles (generally self-published under his G.O.A.T. Comics imprint) uniformly confuse, confound, and challenge me, but even by his standards, his semi-recent (last year? I dunno) B&W mini, titled — nothing, I guess, but listed on his site as No Title — is a quixotic and mercurial beast, its aims and intentions as impossible to pin down as the nature of its threadbare “narrative,” a true case of what’s happening being as fluid and open to any interpretation as why it’s happening.

I will say this much, though — the “people” in it sure do say “fuck” a lot.

Which, I mean, isn’t a knock at all — I do the same myself.  To the point where it even works my own nerves. It’s kinda cute — for lack of a better word immediately coming to mind — in this comic, though, not that…

Coming our way from the UK in 2018 and “boasting” a production budget of 30,000 pounds, writer/director Keith R. Robinson’s Sniper Corpse (now available for streaming on Amazon Prime under the closely-related title of Corpse Sniper — I honestly couldn’t tell you if it’s seen a Blu-ray or DVD release) has precisely one chance to make it : put succinctly, it absolutely needs to punch above its weight class.

Certainly, for a flick with no money it attempts to tell a pretty ambitious story : recently-widowed Diane Keely (played with something very much akin to actual professionalism by Eleri Jones — keep your eye out for her in future), whose husband was killed in action, goes searching for his purportedly “missing” remains  — and some answers — all the way into the heart of darkness, that “darkness” being embodied by one Dr. Craybrick (Tony Eccles, who delivers a solid performance…

My reading pile is a bit all over the map these days — some stuff from the current week, some stuff from previous weeks, and some back issues are all vying for my attention (whatever that’s worth). As things shook out, I ended up reading four new “number ones” the other day, and since we talk about “number ones” a hell of a lot in this column and I’m writing it at 5:30 A.M. and have precisely no mental energy to come up with a different theme, we’re gonna stick with what we know —

Batman : Curse Of The White Knight #1 is the start of what I believe to be a six-parter that sees Sean Murphy return to his “alternate universe” Gotham for another go-’round between Batman, a once-again-evil Joker and, I guess, Azrael, this time under the auspices of DC’s purportedly “prestigious” Black Label imprint. Murphy’s art…

Whatever happened to the real underground, man?

You know the one — it specialized in lurid, obsessively-detailed depictions of squalor, depravity, perversion, and societal collapse. It not only embraced decay, it reveled in it. And it was definitely more than a little bit dangerous — back when it was around.

But perhaps rumors of its demise have been exaggerated. Yeah, you’ve gotta look harder  to find it now that high-brow art comics have swallowed up all the territory that falls outside the mainstream, but a small number of die-hard cartoonists either didn’t get the memo, or tore it up and threw it in the trash where it fucking well belongs.

Which brings us to the Forsley brothers, Cameron and Christopher, and the eighth and most recent issue of their irregularly self-published series. Tat Rat.

Everything about this comic is just plain intense — hyper-detailed woodcut style illustrations, rich inky…

The welcome news that Max Clotfleter, the enfant terrible of the Seattle cartooning scene, will finally be seeing the first comprehensive collection of his comics coming out later this year — courtesy of Birdcage Bottom Books and bearing the title Rooftop Stew (the cover of which is pictured near the bottom of this review) —shouldn’t obscure the fact that he’s been been cobbling together much of his work from parts various and sundry for several years now in the pages of his self-published series Andros, the eighth and most recent issue of which is probably as fine an example of “Clotfelter in microcosm” as you’re likely to find. Assuming, of course, that finding such a thing would be of interest to you.

And hey, who are we kidding? It certainly should be. There’s no doubt that much of Clotfelter’s sensibility emerges from the “confessional/autobio” tradition — see, for example…

A visually lurid and kaleidoscopic amalgamation of the fragmentary, the jumbled, the confused/confusing, and a good deal of the utterly inexplicable, Jason T. Miles’ mini My Fanny #1 (self-published under his G.O.A.T. imprint) is nevertheless a rewarding experience — just don’t ask me to be able to quantify why that’s the case.

Which, I suppose, negates the whole idea of me positioning myself as a “critic” in the first place, but shit — that’s Miles for you. Few cartoonists are as adept as he is at defying everything you think you know about anything, mostly by dint of just ignoring all that exists outside of his own very particular set of sensibilities and/or instincts, and getting you to either buy in or, failing that, simply get the fuck out of his way. There’s no guidebook to either making or reading comics like this, so — go with the flow…