Man, it’s been awhile.

Not as long a while as the gap — no, make that gulf — between Casanova Frankenstein’s The Adventures Of Tad Martin #5 and The Adventures Of Tad Martin #sicksicksix, a book that was literally a couple of decades in the making, but still — four or five years, by my count, is a pretty long wait. Still, as always with The Cartoonist Formerly Known As Al Frank, the wait has proven to be more than worth it.

That being said, in order to fully appreciate Frankenstein’s latest, entitled The Adventures Of Tad Martin Super-Secret Special #1, you have to be a bit of a “process-lover” — or, perhaps more accurately, a “progress lover,” as in “work in.” This is no place for fans of the polished, the refined, the sanitized — this is the straight dope, right from our guy Cassie’s subconscious to his…

Every “cool point” I’ve ever earned with the small press scene is about to fly right out the door/go down the grain/get flushed away/pick your cliche when I admit, right here and now, that I fucking love Ed Brubaker and Sean Phllips’ Criminal. Always have, always will. Not in some lame ironic way. Not as a so-called “guilty pleasure.” I just plain dig the hell out of this comic. I’ve found the duo’s other projects to be a mix of the pretty good (Kill Or Be Killed), the pretty average (Fatale), and the pretty damn lousy (The Fade Out), but Criminal remains the straight dope for fans of comics noir. When I heard they were resurrecting it, and blowing off the lame “story arc” format that afflicts pretty much every other title on LCS shelves in favor of short-form stories, one-shots, and…

Every comic-book reader has it : “their” book. The one that comes along at just the right time in your life and stays with you for the rest of your days. I’ve got a few, truth be told, but one of the big ones is Doom Patrol — specifically, Grant Morrison and Richard Case’s Doom Patrol, that began with issue number 19 of the title’s second go-’round and lasted through number 63, a unique amalgamation of the existential, the conspiratorial, the emotive, and the quite-often indescribable that surely still stands as the most unusual “team book” ever set within the confines of a pre-existing superhero “universe.” Filled to the brim and beyond with Morrison’s patented brand of “high weirdness” but underscored with a palpable strain of sheer heart throughout, it had everything I was looking for in a comic as a teenager — when my interest in the traditional…

As I write this review, news has broken that “president” Donald Trump intends to declare a so-called “state of emergency” along the US-Mexico border in order to commandeer funds for his pipe-dream of a “wall” by executive fiat. A genuine “emergency” has been unfolding, with disastrous consequences, at the border for a long time, it’s true — but it’s nothing like Trump would have you believe.

Italian cartoonist Andrea Ferraris and his documentarian colleague/creative partner, Renato Chiocca, know all about this real “emergency,” though, because they’ve seen it firsthand — and they know it’s got precisely fuck-all to do with some supposedly free-flowing “supply line” of drugs and MS-13 gang members out to rape our daughters, burn down our homes, and butcher our pets. The actual emergency is a humanitarian one, an economic one, even a logistical and conceptual one, as increased militarization of what was once a fairly open…

In perhaps the least surprising development in recent memory, imbued-with-the-power-cosmic Mexican cartoonist Charles Glaubitz has gone “Full Kirby” for Starseeds 2, the eagerly-anticipated sequel to his debut graphic novel (I trust I needn’t drop its name), and the results are pretty damn glorious. Who says the best ideas are necessarily unexpected ones?

Of course, Glaubitz was more than knocking on The King’s door in the first installment of his hopefully-ongoing epic, he was hammering on it — and with this follow-up, he’s smashed it down entirely. But don’t take that to mean he doesn’t have plenty that’s wholly original to add to the mix, because he most emphatically does.

The mythological, cosmological, phantasmagorical, and conspiratorial all collide with passion and vigor in “The Universe According To Glaubitz,” and the end result is a visually-arresting and thought-provoking reading experience well and truly unlike any other, a clash of absolutes that…

James Sturm is an important cartoonist. Why, just ask around — everybody says so. He founded CCS. He gives Ted Talks. His work is parsed over in minute detail in the pages of academic journals. Those rare occasions when he releases new material are heralded as “major” publishing “events.” What he has to say matters, you plebian rube.

Except when it doesn’t. Welcome to Off Season.

Please understand I’m not taking a deliberate “too cool for school” pose here — I’ve enjoyed some of Sturm’s previous stuff, but that was long before he started getting high off the ink of his own press clippings. I still maintain that The Cereal Killings was his finest hour (even if he did crib the ending from Alan Moore, it was an ending that Moore himself had cribbed from Robert Mayer, so — karma and shit, right?), but some of his explorations…

It feels like it’s been awhile since we looked at “Wednesday Warrior” stuff in our Weekly Reading Round-Up, but given that I sampled four new series this past week, now’s probably as good a time as any to steer the focus of this column to the LCS new release racks —

The Girl In The Bay #1 is another “something old, something new” creative team combination of the sort Karen Berger and her protege, Shelly Bond, throw together for their imprints. Dark Horse’s Berger Books line is the imprint in question this time out, and the team is veteran (and consistently undervalued) scribe J.M. DeMatteis and relative “newbie” artist Corin Howell. The premise is intriguing — “hippie chick” gets murdered in 1969, comes back to life 30 minutes later, finds it’s 2019, and  that she didn’t actually die at all but is living out a fairly picturesque dotage in the…

In point of fact, this is probably the sort of comic that I’m predisposed to dislike : it’s not just that I don’t give much of a shit about G.I. Joe and didn’t even when I was at the age where I was supposed to, it’s that exercises soaked in nostalgia don’t appeal to me as a general rule of thumb, and that there’s quite likely no one and nothing appearing on these pages that I’d have any sort of mental or emotional investment in. No offense to anyone who either dug this stuff when they were 12 or who may dig it even still today, but some books simply aren’t this critic’s cup of tea, and by all rights, this should be one of ’em.

But you know what? I said the exact same thing about Bloodstrike : Brutalists, and Michel Fiffe made me glad I stepped out…

Michael Aushenker is nuts.

I mean that in the best possible way, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the time to, and incur the expense of, tracking down some of his more recent stuff after he generously forwarded me a package of his older works a little while back. The “vintage” material is uniformly awesome, as well, but since I’d like you, dear reader, to be able to experience the patented Aushenker insanity for yourself, we’ll be concentrating here on books I know damn well are fairly easy to find.

Trolls follows the — uhhmmm — exploits of deadbeat air traffic controllers Edward and Wayward, two semi-human (I think?) ne’er-do-wells (hell, ne’er-do-anythings, truth be told) who’d rather pig out and sleep than work, unless the boss is off, in which case they’d rather party than work. Kinda like you and me? Maybe — if you refuse to grow up…