It’s no secret that Chicago’s Alex Nall is one of my favorite cartoonists on the face of the goddamn planet. I’ve previously reviewed his long-form works Teaching Comics Volume One, Let Some Word That Is Heard Be Yours, and Lawns on this site, but for this week’s Round-Up column we’re going to look at four of his mins, not least because two of ’em are brand new and you should get your hands on them by whatever means possible! Or, ya know, just head over to his Storenvy site and see what he’s got, or bug him for what he doesn’t until he does. Here’s a link for that :http://alexnallcomics.storenvy.com/products

The Rain Is Slow Coming is one of his brand new ones, a wistful and lyrical “love letter” from a farmer to his daughter about the land they’re barely hanging onto by the skin of their teeth…

There needs to be a new word word in the English language for something less than a fixed and deliberate “event” and more than a random, happenstance “occurrence.” A middle ground of some sort that defines things that are happening, but are just — I dunno, happening.

Cartoonist and musician Christopher Adams has, to date, self-published two issues of his apparently-ongoing series Tack Piano Heaven, and if somebody does come up with this new word, it would describe the succession of less-than-events-more-than-occurrences that play out in its pages perfectly, but until then — shit, I’m kind of a loss to do so. I’ll do my best, but fair warning : it may not be good enough.

Which is, of course, what makes this comic so exciting and interesting — it’s literally impossible to pin down. Adams lays out pages in a way you’ve never seen before, intercuts his…

Ariel Cooper’s first self-published comic, Ghost Sickness, blew me away. Her second, Castle Of The Beast (sub-titled A Theory Of Time Travel) goes even further, shattering your view of the so-called “fourth dimension” and re-assembling it into something immediately and intrinsically familiar, but nevertheless altogether different. And I say this, mind you, as somebody who’s felt that the concept of time was complete bullshit pretty much since I was a teenager.

Linear time has been assaulted from every angle in the not-too-distant “past” — scientific treatises from Stephen Hawking, anarchist broadsides from John Zerzan, and 1,300-page literary masterworks from Alan Moore have all taken a crack at the foundations of its crumbling edifice — but Cooper is taking a different tack, presenting a work of art that makes you feel your way toward a better, deeper, and yes, more accurate understanding of the ultimately undefinable force…

Here’s the thing about Seattle cartoonist Kalen Knowles — yes, his stuff is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. And yes, some of it’s admirably and astonishingly weird. Anyone even mildly familiar with his work knows these things. What’s less remarked upon, though, at least as far as I can tell, is how — dare I invoke the term — heartwarming a whole lot of it is.

He’s also well-attuned to the perspective of the genuine outcast and outsider, the person (or, more often, creature) who simply doesn’t fit in, who stands apart, whose individuality can’t really be subsumed under layers of “going along to get along” deliberate obfuscation. Combine that sympathetic understanding with that penchant for the — again with the dread word — heartwarming, and the results can be pretty special, indeed. Example number one of this was Journal, the innovatively-told story of Atticus the squid boy previously reviewed…

After a long period of silence and speculation, iconoclastic small-press mainstay publisher 2dcloud has re-emerged with their 2019 kickstarter campaign. I recently spoke with co-publisher/founder Raighne (the surname “Hogan” is no more) about matters past, present, and future. Full disclosure : I’m rooting for their campaign to be successful and plan on contributing myself, but there are a number of people in the small-press community who feel that they’d like some more concrete answers as to what’s going on before they make the decision of whether or not to back the campaign themselves. His answers here may or may not satisfy, but after well over a year of shying away from anything resembling the “limelight,” it’s important, I feel, to give Hogan the chance to answer some questions so that people can make an informed decision on whether or not they wish to support his company’s efforts going forward.

For…

We’ve talked about fellow Minneapolis “product” Peter Faecke in this column before, but it’s never a bad time to do so again, and I’ve decided that “never a bad time” is now. All the following comics can be ordered up from Pete’s online store, charming called “The Stink Hole.” Your link :https://thestinkhole.storenvy.com/

The Bartbarian In : Learning To Unlearn is a bizarrely contemplative slap-dash mini printed on suitably gaudy yellow paper that features a protagonist who’s a mash-up of Bart Simpson and a homoerotic take on Conan the Barbarian (then again, it’s Conan we’re talking about, so maybe the “homoerotic” part is redundant) traversing a lonely physical and psychic wasteland in search of his adversary/potential friend, Thrillhouse. When they meet, will battle ensue, or something altogether more rewarding and satisfying? Treads similar thematic ground to Faecke’s Pardners, minus the obvious performance anxiety parallels. A nice throwback to the…

When last we saw him at the end of episode eleven of DC Universe’s original streaming series Doom Patrol, Joivan Wade’s Vic Stone was in a bad place — metaphorically and literally. His increasingly-mechanized body and mind betraying him, he made the drastic decision to part company with his operating system, known as GRID, but any monetary respite he hoped to gain from such an action was quickly dashed when he found himself captured by The Bureau of Normalcy and imprisoned at their top-secret research/torture facility nicknamed The Ant Farm.

Not that this latest installment, entitled (appropriately enough) “Cyborg Patrol,”gives any concrete reason as to how and why the place found itself saddled with such a moniker, unlike the Grant Morrison/Steve Yeowell comic the idea was lifted from, but the principle nature of the operation remains true to its printed-page antecedent — even if it’s located nowhere near the…

It’s always a pleasure to read something new (or, in this case, new-ish) from Paradise Systems, R. Orion Martin’s small-press imprint self-tasked with exposing the rest of the world to the joys and idiosyncrasies of contemporary Chinese “alternative” cartooning, and one of the more fascinating things they’re doing is trying to re-introduce to the cultural landscape the lianhuanhua, a once-popular publication format that presents short, “punchy,” one-panel-per-page stories in a pocket-sized package. We looked at one of these — Woshibai’s Migraine — a few months back, and now we turn our collective attention to Gantea’s Two Stories, a comic that, full disclosure, I was initially inclined to dismiss as being too self-consciously “cute” for its own good.

Here’s the thing, though — I get shit wrong. A lot. Just ask my wife. And this unassuming little booklet continues a string of very strong comics bearing this…

I don’t know what the fuck you can do with two bucks anymore.

Not only can you not got a beer with it, much less anything more interesting like, say, a hit of acid, you can barely get a candy bar or a goddamn Slim Jim. Two bucks, seriously, ain’t shit.

Max Clotfleter could probably get away with charging a lot more than that for his latest self-published mini, The Elements Of Rough, Volume Two — but that’s all he’s asking, and while it’s a tough little item to find outside the Seattle area (although I’m willing to bet John Porcellino’s Spit And A Half distro will have it up for sale sooner or later), it’s absolutely worth whatever effort you have to put in to track it down — as well as, of course, its two-dollar cover price.

The second in Clotfelter’s occasional series designed to answer the…