Ostensibly a sequel to her earlier, and justly well-received,  The Song Of Aglaia, French cartoonist Anne Simon’s newly-released-in-English (and in color!) The Empress Cixtisis (originally published in 2014 under the title Cixtite Imperatrice) is something rather more than that, in actuality — I mean, yeah, Aglaia’s back and all, but she’s just one of a pair of dueling pro/antagonists, the other being our titular Empress, who is herself a barely-concealed (to say nothing of bitingly sardonic) stand-in for the “real life” Empress Dowager Cixi of China, who effectively ruled that country for nearly 50 years. We’ve got an ambitious and multi-faceted text going on here, then, but here’s the thing with Simon — no matter how conceptually and theoretical dense her work may be, it’s never anything less than a pure joy to read.

In fact, my one and only complaint about The Empress Cixtisis is that, at…

So — who do we believe? Over at TCJ, inexplicably popular critic Matt Seneca used his review of Hartley Lin’s recently-released Pope Hats #6 as a platform for anti-natalist proselytizing and to burnish his “edgelord” bone fides, while at Sequential State, my friend Alex Hoffman adorned it with glowing praise, admittedly filtered though his own parental sensibilities. Can they both be right and/or wrong?

Well — theoretically, sure. But as circumstance would have it, I find myself leaning more toward “Team Hoffman” on this one, although I don’t see the latest issue of the long-running AdHouse Books series, which carries the title of “Shapeshifter,” as a revolutionary departure for anyone but cartoonist Lin himself, who telegraphs his intentions early on by ditching his “Ethan Rilly” pseudonym and positioning himself as being smaller in stature than his infant son and a toy (?) ladybug on the comic’s cover. He’s still…

Densely atmospheric, detailed yet scratchy, erotically charged, Gothic in the truest sense of the word, and falling along a stylistic continuum somewhere between Edgar Allen Poe and Dame Darcy, cartoonist Julia Gfrorer (perhaps best known for her Fantagraphics-published Laid Waste and Black Is The Color) is a true autuer, someone whose vision, and well as its means of expression, are entirely and uniquely her own — even, perhaps paradoxically, when she’s not working alone, as is the case with her occasional collaborations with writer Sean T. Collins. For purposes of this week’s Round-Up, though, we’ll be concentrating on some examples of her solo work, specifically four extraordinary minis she self-published under her Thuban Press imprint —

I can sum up To Dark To See best, I think, with the words “haunting as fuck” because, whaddya know, it’s about fucking and haunting. And mistrust. And psychologically abusive relationships. And…

Sometimes a comic’s format is so utterly unique that it’s worth commenting on in and of itself — and may even raise it a notch or two in any given critic’s estimation. It shouldn’t, I suppose, be that way — the quality of the story and art really ought to be all that matters, in theory — but what if the publication in question is so innovative in terms of its physical presentation that said presentation becomes an integral aspect of the art itself?

This is particularly true in the case of a mini, where a limited number of pages necessarily makes the manner in which those pages are delivered to readers really stand out, for good or ill. Which brings us, an unforgivable two paragraphs in, to Max Huffman’s latest self-published mini, the intriguingly-titled Funky Dianetics.

This attractive riso-printed number that rolled off the presses in November of…

Ostensibly billed as a “mystery” by its publisher, Silver Sprocket, Gnartoons creator James The Stanton’s latest mini, I Think Our Friend Dan Might Be A Dolphin is, I suppose, just that — if only because you’ll be mystified as to why it’s labeled as such.

“Spoiler” alert, if such a thing is necessary : Dan is a dolphin. And a particularly randy and gluttonous one, it would seem, although for all I know maybe all dolphins are. Never having known one personally myself, I couldn’t say for sure. But there’s definitely something about Dan’s behavior that seems a bit — I dunno — over the top?

Maybe we’re just pre-disposed to think of dolphins as nature’s “good guys.” We’re told that they’re damn near as smart as we are — hell, we’re told by Douglas Adams that they’re even smarter. Which, given the recent course of human history, isn’t…

We’ve all had ’em — those days when you go in to work and just feel like high-tailing it in the other direction for reasons that are difficult to quantify as they are to ignore.

Work — who the hell came up with this idea? Does anyone, on their deathbed, lament not putting in enough hours on the job? Is selling away time you can’t get back in exchange for money you can’t take with you when you’re gone a fair deal no matter how much (or, is far more common in this day and age, how little) you’re being paid?

We all know the answer to these questions, of course. And yet most of us turn up at 9:00 AM (or whenever), clock in, and get down to business — and more often than not, it’s someone else’s business we’re getting down to. But if you’re in…

Not so long ago, I was pretty rough on the first issue of cartoonist Jai Granofsky’s self-published “solo anthology” series, What The Actual. I found it unfocused, uninspired, unfunny, and uninteresting. I took no pleasure in raking the book over the coals — I never do, particularly when it comes to “labors of love” — but I think (or at least I hope) that I avoided laying a “give it up and stick with the day job” type of trip on the artist himself. Certainly his solid “classical cartooning” style provides evidence enough that Granofsky has some talent, but my feeling was that his entire project was in need of a good, solid “re-think” from top to bottom.

Enter the just-released What The Actual #2, which isn’t exactly a complete re-tooling, but at least represents a kind of promising, albeit tentative, step in the right direction — and…

Sometimes, as a writer, you like to throw little challenges at yourself, just to make things more interesting — especially when it comes to long-running columns such as this. My self-appointed challenge this week : to see if I can crank out one of these Round-Ups in 30 minutes or less. Let’s see how that goes —

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang ride off into the sunset with Paper Girls #30, the conclusion to their long-running Spielbergian fan-favorite series from Image, and as far as finales go, this one’s a clinic : we start with a dream sequence, we then return to the “real world” much as our memory-wiped protagonists have, and how much they will or might remember is sorta the theme here. Lots of gorgeous double-page spreads give this extra-length issue a little extra “breathing room” to say a proper good-bye to the girls, and all in…

I’ve got something of a love/hate relationship with Robert Sergel — most of Eschew missed the mark in my estimation, ditto for September 12th — but when he hits, goddamn does he hit. Bald Knobber is the kind of comic Charles Forsman has always been desperately trying to make, and Joe Bonaparte is quietly, darkly sublime stuff. His latest Kilgore mini, Desolation Bay, looked intriguing to me simply because it seems a step well outside his wheelhouse, being set in 1831 Patagonia, and because the green-yellow color palette marks an abrupt and exciting change from his usual (very) black-and-white artwork. I always appreciate steps into the unknown, even if/when they come up short, just because a comfortable cartoonist is a dull cartoonist, and I give Sergel props — even when his stuff doesn’t “click” with me, it’s never dull.

This ambitious little number is no exception, focused as it…

Michael Aushenker is one of those folks that I automatically associate with one particular genre of comics storytelling — that being slapstick humor — but then, I also consider him to be a cartoonist who draws as well as writes his own material. What the hell do I know, though? His latest self-published release, The Ghost Pirate, puts paid to both of those notions in that it’s decidedly not aimed directly at the funnybone and is also, in point of fact, a collaboration with artist Marcus Collar that relegates Aushenker to scripting duties only.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that if you think you know “what to expect” from a Michael Aushenker comic — as I surely did — you’re in for something of a surprise here.

A time-twisting tale that starts off in 1775 with our titular pirate, who answers to the name of Molitar…