I’ve always been a fan of single-creator anthologies — having literally cut my comics -reading teeth on books like Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur, Daniel Clowes’ Eightball, Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff and Hate, etc. — and while there are more small-press and “indie” comics to choose from than ever these days, “solo” anthology titles are a pretty rare thing to find, so I’m always on the lookout for them, and recently my never-ending quest led me to Jai Granofsky’s magazine-sized What The Actual #1.

Clearly we’re in “labor of love” territory here given that Granofsky financed the publication of this himself, but the contemporary comic book landscape is littered with work by people who think they have something worth saying despite no evidence being on offer to support that belief, so it’s not like putting a few thousand bucks of your own money — daunting as that no…

If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then Italian cartoonist Sergio Ponchione is the most flattering guy around, as his late-2018 Fantagraphics book Memorabilia — extrapolated from, and featuring the entire contents of, his 2014 stand-alone (or so we thought at the time) “floppy” DKW – Ditko Kirby Wood — is pure homage, not just to the aforementioned “holy trinity” of Steve, Jack, and Wally, but also to Will Eisner and Richard Corben, all of whom Ponchione is capable of mimicking to the proverbial “T.” Consequently, this not-quite-a-graphic-novel is certainly fun to look at, at times even breathtaking.

And that, as they say, is the good news.

As for the not-so-good-news — ah, shit, where to even begin? Ponchione’s set-up here is simple enough that it could work — starry-eyed young cartoonist visits his hero (Ponchione himself, in case you were wondering), hoping to glean pearls of…

It’s never a bad time to have a look at the latest from Columbus, Ohio’s Brian Canini, and given that he’s got a veritable raft of new minis available, that “never a bad time” is, specifically, now. Each of the following is available for $1.99 from Canini’s Drunken Cat Comics self-publishing imprint at http://drunkencatcomics.storenvy.com/

Plastic People #9 continues Canini’s long-form narrative about the first murder in decades to occur in a plastic surgery-obsessed future Los Angeles. This time out our pair of detectives’ search for clues, motives, or both takes them to the First Church Of The Surgeons, a part-cult/part-nudist camp extolling the virtues of surgically-achieved “perfection” with a kind of religious zeal because — well, it’s a religion. Agreeably illustrated in Canini’s skillfully minimalist style, a few curious choices in terms of grammar and syntax aren’t enough to dampen my enthusiasm for what is one of the best…

Suffused throughout with a light touch that can best be described as genuinely tender, Maia Kobabe’s Lion Forge-published Gender Queer : A Memoir comes across as anything other than the seismic shift it is in terms of consciousness-raising — and maybe that’s what makes it one in the first place. Eschewing the polemic, Kobabe opts for the conversational and, as such, eir (Spivak pronouns — look ’em up if you must, I confess that I had to) story is universally accessible, but in no way represents a “dumbing-down” of its complex subject matter.

I’ll be the first to admit that as a straight white male I may just be the last critic on the planet qualified to comment on the story of a person slowly coming to terms with eir identity as a non-binary, asexual person, but by the same token, it’s folks in my shoes most in need…

Don’t let the sheer physical size of writer Viken Berberian and artist Yann Kebbi’s The Structure Is Rotten, Comrade intimidate you — much. Yeah, it’s a hefty hardcover tome that Fantagraphics has published here, clocking in at 320 pages (I assume its original French-language edition is roughly the same, give or take a title page or two), but it reads reasonably quickly. Much of the real wok comes later, when one mentally “unpacks” everything that’s been absorbed at breakneck speed.

That’s because this is a conceptually dense book in the extreme — and yes, I most assuredly do mean that as a compliment. But perhaps I’m pre-disposed toward appreciating it given what’s been happening not in the Armenian capital city of Yerevan, where this story takes place, but in my own hometown of Minneapolis.

Like too many municipalities to mention — maybe even yours — we’ve been inundated here in…

On the surface, Italian cartoonist Manuele Fior’s early-2000s graphic novel Red Ultramarine — just, and finally, released in a handsome, hardbound English translation by Fantagraphics — is a deceptively simple rumination on the dangers of ambition and obsession, creatively expressed by means of a dual-track narrative that juxtaposes a modern (I think, at any rate) Faust-derived cautionary tale revolving around a woman trying to save her architect love interest from his own OCD excess with a rather novel mash-up of the Greek myths of Daedalus/Icarus and Theseus/The Minotaur. Both stories are written in brisk and concise fashion, hitting just the right “beats” at just the right points to make the parallels between them obvious without belaboring matters, but Fior’s never been about “surface level” readings — and this is not only no exception, it’s the work that well and truly got the whole ball rolling in that regard.

You…

I don’t keep precise track, but it seems like it’s been a good month or two since the Round-Up looked at new “mainstream” stuff to that hit LCS shops the previous Wednesday, so we’re gonna correct that imbalance by looking at two first issues and two last issues that saw release this week. We’ll start with the “starts” and stop with the “stops,” if it’s all the same to you —

Killer Groove #1 comes our way from Aftershock and the writer/artist team of Ollie Masters and Eoin Marron. Masters seems to dig the “1970s period-piece noir with a twist” premise, as this is his second foray down that particular rabbit-hole, the first being his Vertigo series The Kitchen, soon to be a major Hollywood blockbuster starring Melissa McCarthy. This one seems just as ripe for commercial exploitation, but so far characterization, motivations, even the plot itself are all…

There’s a sense you get from page one of Nina Bunjevac’s new graphic novel Bezimena (presented in an oversized, lavish hardcover by publisher Fantagraphics) — the idea that this is no mere foray into the depraved mind of a sexually-charged psychopath. That there’s quite a bit more going on here.

And no, I don’t just mean the eerie and obvious parallels to the ancient Greek myth of Artemis and Siproites hidden in plain sight in the narrative. Nor do I mean the way in which Bunjevac seems to intuitively map out the complete psychogeography of her depraved protagonist, Benny, whose obsessive nature is reflected in the book’s painstakingly-detailed, luridly mesmerizing art, a succession of splash pages that each look as though they took a month or more to get exactly right. Nope — those things aren’t what I’m talking about, even though they are surely worth talking about.

Is this…

Yup, we’ve seen it before : the college/art school, or the post-college/post-art school, memoir has been a ubiquitous fixture of the “alternative” comics scene for three decades or so — more than enough time, in fact, for people who grew up reading these sorts of things to have kids of their own who now, in turn, have their own “twentysomething” stories to tell.

So, sure, Kelsey Wroten’s new hardcover graphic novel from Uncivilized Books, Cannonball, makes me feel ancient. And the publishers’ promo blurb describing it “Art School Confidential for the Tumblr generation” makes me feel even older than that. But is this really another memoir about an aimless young adult?

I truly don’t know. Wroten — who illustrates the proceedings in an agreeably modern updating of “classic cartooning” style and employs a very pleasing dulled-pastels color scheme throughout — more than likely places a lot of herself…