What happens when a couple of stoner buddies, with an assist from their possibly-visionary older homeless “third wheel” sidekick, stumble across the machinations of an ancient cult devoted to summoning up some supernatural bird-creature or other, and then find themselves unable to stop their not-quite-dastardly plan?

I’ve never asked myself that multi-faceted question, but apparently Iowa City-based cartoonist Samuel D. Benson has, and he answers it over the course of 50 magazine-sized pages in his latest self-published opus, A Different Sky. The answer? Not much. But this one’s much more about the journey than it is the (non-) resolution.

Massive props where they’re due : Benson absolutely draws the living shit out of every panel. Vaguely Joshua Cotter-esque cross-hatching and barely-constrained linework take up every scintilla of real estate — yet nothing either looks or feels over-rendered or otherwise too “busy” for its own good. This is art that…

Reasonably hot off the heels of her magnificent, dreamlike Recollection, breathtaking comics poetry auteur Alyssa Berg returns with another self-published collection, Soft Fascinations, once again riso-printed with a varied and deeply sympathetic color palette that accentuates her themes of memory, fluidity, sensory consciousness, and transcendence with a kind of remarkably naturalistic aplomb, while at the same time bathing the book’s expressive illustrations with a soft, ephemeral glow. Calling it “beautiful” doesn’t do it nearly enough justice — trust me.

At just 20 pages, this is a shorter work than Berg’s last, justly-celebrated release, and yet it feels more conceptually “tight” and focused, as if each short “strip” (a term we’ll employ, by dint of sheer necessity, in as broad and expansive a fashion as possible) builds upon the one before it to present, in the end, a holistic journey within that is grounded not so much — okay…

Defying description as non-chalantly as it does logic and reason, Chicago-based cartoonist Gabriel Howell’s physically impressive (heavy construction-type paper; perfect binding; French-folded, oversized pages) 2018 self-published comic Father is one of those works that bypasses the conscious mind and goes right for the id — with a fucking scalpel. It doesn’t “leave a mark” so much as it carves one in, and you’re not going to emerge out the other side the same person as when you opened it up.

If that description scares you, it probably should — this is a horror comic, after all, and while its surface-level terrors are easy enough to spot and fit roughly into the loose category of “biological horror,” its conceptual terrors are more oblique, more unsettling, and more likely to stay put in your newly-scarred mind. This is a book that gets its hooks in you — and then pulls on them…

We’ll start this one off with a confession that may point to my own shortcomings as a writer more than anything else : I’ve been vacillating on whether or not to review Lisa Hanawalt’s late-2018 Drawn + Quarterly graphic novel, Coyote Doggirl, for several months now simply because I’m not quite sure how to approach it. I even discussed the reasons behind my reluctance my reluctance on my Patreon page (first free plug — the longer, “official” one follows, as always, at the end) while zeroing in on the one big problem with the book that I have — one that is in no way a reflection on the work itself, nor on Hanawalt’s cartooning skills in general. Now that I’m “going for it,” though, I’m not going to beat around the bush:

This book is ridiculously over-priced.

That’s it. That’s my “beef” with it in a nutshell. On…

When is a step out of the nest anything but?

How about — when a TV series does an “offbeat” episode (a very relative term here, I realize, as the entire show is “offbeat” in the extreme) where no one leaves the house?

Which isn’t, mind you, to say that “not a lot happens” — or your preferred alternative turn of phrase essentially describing the same thing — in “Therapy Patrol,” the seventh installment of the DC Universe original streaming series Doom Patrol. Quite a lot does — in terms of development, disintegration, and re-development of team dynamics, fleshing out key character “backstories” even more, etc. There’s no visible villain on offer, though (even if Mr. Nobody’s presence continues to loom large and, in a very real sense, informs everything that happens), Timothy Dalton’s “Chief” Niles Caulder remains conspicuous by his absence, and yeah  —  more or…

Fuck the internet. Once upon a time, if you wanted to get your thoughts on any given random-ass subject (say, for instance, comics) out there to a tiny sliver of the public, you had to go to the trouble of writing ’em down, constructing them into articles, essays, or at least rants, designing and laying out pages, selecting and/or commissioning illustrations, and then slapping everything between two covers and actually publishing what you’d come up with.

It took guts. It took determination. It took commitment. And it took cash that most ‘zine creators were sorely lacking. Fortunately, some folks still refuse the “easy out” offered by digital and continue to produce these labors of genuine love. For this week’s Round-Up column, I thought I’d draw attention to some notable recent examples —

Mineshaft #36 is the latest issue of Everett Rand and Gioia Palimieri’s long-running, idiosyncratic, expertly-curated (a term…

There are tough reviews to write — and then there are damn tough reviews to write.

This one’s the latter, obviously, but not because reading the 2018-published collection of the late, great Mark Campos’ autobio webcomic Casino Son was anything less than an absolutely splendid experience, no — it’s simply a fact that this is one of those instances where separating art from artist is so utterly impossible that one shouldn’t even pretend to keep up the pretext.

Here, then, is the last work of an utterly unpretentious, immensely- (and justly-)respected talent, whose naturalistic tone, poignant observation skills, fluid minimalist line, and eye and ear for entirely unforced humor are put to use on the very best possible subject — himself. Specifically, his younger self, coming of age in late-’60s/early-’70s Reno, Nevada, a culturally- and emotionally-dislocated kid of Mexican-American heritage at at time — and in a place — where…

One more week, four more first issues — there’s patterns, there’s trends, then there’s ways of fucking life. In any case, enjoy this one ‘cuz for the first and probably only time in the history and future of this column we’ve got two — Marvel books this week? I shit you not. But we’re gonna save ’em for the end. First up —

You know that feeling when you just know you’re getting in on the ground floor of something great? Doesn’t happen often enough — I’m thinking Saga #1 had it, certainly Sandman #1 if you wanna go way back, but you know it when you see it — a book that hits the scene fully-formed, with a clear vision of what it is , where it’s going, what it will become in the future, all that. A completely-realized world  from top to bottom, everything thought through, from…

How far the DC Universe original streaming series Doom Patrol has come — as well as how fast it’s come to be at this high-water creative mark — is best judged by episode six, curiously (but, as it turns out, accurately) entitled “Doom Patrol Patrol,” the installment that deviates furthest from the show’s comic book roots, taking only inspiration and some telling visual cues (specifically relating to Diane Guerrero’s “Crazy” Jane confronting the demons of her past) from its four-color progenitor, but no specific plot points or lines of dialogue, as has been the case every week up until now.

Not that there isn’t plenty on offer to appeal to even the funnybook’s longest-tenured fans : when a part of the team goes to investigate the apparently-retired superhero trio known as the Doom Patrol at the urging of the villainous Mr. Nobody, we get to meet Steve Dayton/Mento (played with…

In 2007, to the notice of probably no one apart from a few of his local Minneapolis-area friends, “outsider” cartoonist David Tea released issue number six of his sporadically self-published Five Perennial Virtues digest-sized series. In 2017, for reasons known only to himself, he’s re-releasing it, plus a bunch of old sketches, under the title of Bronze Table Of The Blade Masters. This is something we should all be very happy about.

The reasons why we ought to be so are hard to quantify, of course, but then so is Tea’s work — eschewing basically every established rule of cartooning more, it seems, out of necessity than any sort of deliberate design, one could fairly argue that nothing happens in this comic, but then it really doesn’t need to in order for it to be interesting, simply because its aesthetic, its construction, its very reason for being is almost…