Three episodes in, the DC Universe streaming television series Doom Patrol is proving to be a genuine amalgamation : yeah, the Grant Morrison/Richard Case era of the comic is still the primary “source material,” but more and more the Arnold Drake/Bruno Premiani influence is being felt, and there’s plenty here that’s altogether new, as well, making this show that rarest of rare things : one where you literally never know what’s going to happen.

The most recent installment, “Puppet Patrol,” is probably the farthest “step out of the nest” yet — for both the characters in Tamara Becher and Tom Farrell’s razor-sharp script, and for the program in a more general, thematic sense. With Timothy Dalton’s Chief missing and a localized search proving fruitless (there’s a surreal and hilarious scene centered around Diane Guerrero’s “Crazy” Jane kicking off the episode that drives this point home with some bloody laughs)…

Better late than never, right? Sorry for not having this Round-Up column ready last Sunday, as is my custom, but “real life” kept yours truly busy for just a bit there, and now I’m playing catch-up. Fortunately, what I’m catching up on are four very good comics, all published under Image’s auspices. Let us waste no more time —

Oliver #1 was a book I was a bit hesitant about, due to no fault of creators Gary Whitta and Darick Robertson. It’s just that the idea of a dystopian take on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist had already been done recently over at Dark Horse’s Berger Books imprint, and frankly, Olivia Twist was well and truly awful. This, on the other hand — well, let’s just say I’m more than happy I put my reservations aside and gave it a shot.

Whitta is a veteran screenwriter known for his work on…

Fair warning : if you’re one of those folks who, reasonably enough, wants to know why a critic likes something (or otherwise), you may as well go no further. This review will only drive you batty. But, seriously — what other choice do I have?

George Horner’s self-published ‘zine Incoherents is, you see, not what it appears. The artist (he’s not a “cartoonist” in the traditional sense of the term) himself states that it’s “an artist book in the form of a comic book. Each page — torn out of a vintage (Golden & Silver Age) comic book and then painted in a redacting fashion, obscuring and abstracting text and images.” What this means, in purely practical terms, is a bunch of clipped drawings floating against mostly (though not exclusively) black backgrounds. Think Samplerman set in a void (or, if you like, the void), and you’re not too far off…

Is there a more all-encompassing trap than that of immortality? I mean, living forever sounds great on paper, but what if it actually came to pass?

Eight pages may sound like nowhere near enough to explore a topic this weighty, but in cartoonist Morgan Vogel’s self-published mini Valle, he manages to take a pretty good whack at it as his titular protagonist, and a handful of others, find themselves “shanghaied” (or possibly born — certainly endlessly reborn) into a vitrual reality scenario where they are not allowed to die. Which might be cool if the place looked fun, but it doesn’t.

Austere, I believe, is the word we’re looking for, one that applies to both the landscape of the “world” the story takes place in and to Vogel’s art, its simple yet undoubtedly expressive lines delineating what can only best be described as an endless expanse of…

There are a million ways to think — and, more importantly, to feel — about Isabel Reidy (or, as they bill themselves here, “Izzy True”)’s mind-bending and frankly devastating full-color mini Shitty Lover, but however you interpret it, one thing is for certain : you’ve bound to be impressed.

And I use that term in the strictest, most literal sense — this is work that leaves an impression. An impression that will no doubt vary from reader to reader and perhaps, even, from reading to reading, but nevertheless, a mark is always left. A very indelible mark, at that.

Magnificently painted in vibrant and arresting hues, the narrative here is necessarily a loose one, a tale of cosmic-level longing fulfilled in the form of a cruel joke at best, an ironic twist of fate at worst, as “shitty” love proves to be far more damaging, more negating

Those who know far more about the craft (we’ll stick with that term given that it seldom rises to the level of “art’) of television writing tell me that second episodes are the trickiest wicket of all — at the starting gate you simply lay enough of your cards on the table to grab peoples’ attention, but not so many that they’ll walk away figuring they’ve got the whole show sussed out; with episodes three on out you’re essentially preaching to the choir; but episode two is the one that has to turn the casual viewers into die-hards, has to keep the butts in the seats. The “insta-fans” are already on board, but the “take it or leave it” crowd — the really fickle folks — well, they’re looking for a reason to take it. This is your one and only chance.

“Showrunner” Jeremy Carver turns the writing chores for…

Two notable debuts and two equally-notable finales were among the “big stories” in the world of the “Wednesday Warrior” this past week, so let’s take a look at them all and see how they either kicked things off or wrapped them up —

Sharkey The Bounty Hunter #1 (Image/Millarworld) from Mark Millar and Simone Bianchi isn’t exactly “Heavy Metal for the whole family” (Sharkey has sex with a hot half-robot chick, after all), but it’s pretty close, as our hard-ass-with-a-heart-of-gold hero takes it upon himself to escort a kid he just made an orphan halfway across the galaxy (or maybe it’s the universe) to the home planet of his closest living relatives — until a big payday “score” falls into his lap when the most-wanted criminal in the universe (or maybe it’s the galaxy) gets a price put on his head that’s high enough to send every freelance scalp-chaser…

Nothing constrains Eric Kostiuk Williams. His cartooning is never less than near-infinitely adapatable, fluid, mercurial — maybe literally, as his forms, figures, even structures seem liquid at room temperature, ever in a state of joyous flux, refusing to define themselves and embracing the joyous possibilities of being whatever their whims allow them to be.

His late-2018 Retrofit/Big Planet Release, Our Wretched Town Hall — a collection of short stories and illustrations — is my third exposure to his work, following on from Babybel Wax Bodysuit and Condo Heartbreak Disco, and certainly continues the pattern of no real pattern, as each vibrantly-colored panel promising an almost entirely different visual experience to the one before it. Here, though, the “quick hits” succession of strips combine to form something of an overarching statement that says : we are whatever we wish to be in any given moment, and “permanence” is only what…

Regular readers around here are used to seeing me looking at old friend Brian Canini’s works in my Weekly Reading Round-Up columns — short-form works like his tending to lend themselves well to one- or two-paragraph “capsule reviews” (such as the one that’ll be soon forthcoming for the newest issue of his ongoing Plastic People series) — but sometimes even the most modest mini can be well-served by a full-length examination, and his latest, Two Stories, definitely fits that bill.

I’ve always dug Canini’s minimalist cartooning style that utilizes a little to say a lot, his economic imagery drawing the eye precisely where it needs to go with just enough by way of “bells and whistles” to make things interesting though not nearly enough to make them cluttered, but even more than that it’s his thematic versatility that impresses me, and the apparent ease with which he can adapt…

It used to be said that the inane sitcom Seinfeld was “a show about nothing,” which was no doubt true, but Brazilian cartoonist Julia Balthazar has a much better idea — her new comic Vows (or, as it’s known in its native Portuguese, Juras) is about everything and nothing simultaneously.

We have Laura Lannes to thank for this extraordinary little book making its way to American audiences by way of her recently-launched Pacote imprint, which is releasing four comics from Brazil in the next four months, each Riso-printed with exacting care by Carta Monir’s Diskette Press, and if subsequent releases are this good, then we’ve got a whole lot to look forward to. But I suppose we needn’t get too far ahead of ourselves yet when there’s still this one to talk about, am I right?

A family gathering is the setting for Balthazar’s story, but in so…