With the advent (ha! Get it?) of December, the time has come, once again, for our annual look back at some of the finest comics the year had to offer. We’ll be skipping the usual offerings for the next week or two around here, including the Weekly Reading Round-Up column, since re-reading is your humble emcee’s top priority for the next little while. A run-down, then, of the six different categories I’ve broken things down into is in order, and please keep in mind that I’m deliberately eschewing calling any of these lists a “best-of” simply because I haven’t read everything that’s out there — and who could? Think of these, then, as lists of the ten best entries in each category that I’ve read. Or my own personal favorites. Or something. Anyway, “brackets” are as follows:

Top Ten Single Issues – Pretty self-explanatory, I should think…

In a way, I suppose, it makes sense that a cartoonist as image-conscious as Benjamin Marra would find “inspiration” in the ultimate story of excess and artifice, American Psycho, but for a guy who’s spent most of his career deliberately confounding readers as to how much of what he’s doing is sincere and how much is, as the Brits would say, a “piss-take,” his decision to do a bunch of pencil-and-ink drawings based not on Brett Easton Ellis’ novel but, specifically, on the Mary Harron cinematic adaptation starring Christian Bale is, if anything, too obvious — after all, when you strip away any pretense of “spoof” from Marra’s work, you rob it of a pretty good chunk of whatever ostensible “power” it may possess. “I just dig this shit” is an honest enough statement to make, however surreptitiously, but when you steadfastly refuse to answer the natural follow-up question…

When “off the beaten path” is your norm, then what are you supposed to do when you want to go “off the beaten path” yourself? You watch something normal, I guess.

I admit that espionage “thrillers” are not high on my own personal “to-watch” list very often, but the other night, browsing through the films available on our local cable system’s streaming service, I decided to give director Billy Ray’s well-reviewed 2007 offering Breach a shot, simply because I was in the mood for something it would never occur to me to even watch, much less write about. I duly watched it — and now I’m writing about it.

Based on the investigation into, and subsequent arrest of, notorious FBI “mole” Robert Hanssen, a guy who was selling us out to the Russians long before the current president made such things fashionable, Breach is no doubt somewhat over-dramatized, but…

I admit, I’d blissfully forgotten about director Stewart Raffill’s godawful 1988 E.T. rip-off Mac And Me until it turned up as the first “episode” of the new “season” of Netflix’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 revival. I mean, I saw it as a kid, but I remember being fundamentally unimpressed by it even then — and now I remember why : it’s basically a 90-ish minute McDonald’s (and Coke, and Skittles — but mainly Mickey D’s) commercial strung out over the barest skeleton of a script.

If you think that’s too harsh an assessment, I assure you it’s not, and offer this mercifully brief “plot” synopsis as proof : wheelchair-bound youth Eric Cruise (played with an annoying level of over-sincerity, but no discernible talent, by Jade Calegory), his older brother, Michael (Jonathan Ward), and their mom, Janet (Christine Ebersole) are in the midst of a cross-country move from Chicago to California…

It was my distinct pleasure to review this extraordinary comic for Daniel Elkin’s Your Chicken Enemy website. Edits by the esteemed Mr. Elkin were few and far between this time around, but I present it here in its original form both for curious parties and those who are “into” the art (and that’s exactly what it is) of editing. As always, the insights and suggestions provided by Mr. Elkin resulted in the final version of the piece being much stronger.

I’m hoping to have some more reviews up on YCE in the not-too-distant future — until then, if you wish to do a “compare and contrast” between this early version and the one that ended up posted over there, the “finished product” can be found here :http://www.danielelkin.com/2018/11/the-intimate-is-universal-ryan-carey.html

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We are where we come from, the saying goes — and if that’s the case, Lauren Weinstein’s newborn daughter, Sylvia, needn’t…

What’s wrong with having a good laugh every now and then, I ask you?

Seattle’s Brandon Lehmann may not be the most thematically ambitious cartoonist working these days (then again, maybe he is and just manages to conceal it well), but there’s not question he’s among the funniest, and in some ways it’s kind of sad that we’ve moved beyond the point where that was enough.

Which isn’t me saying that it’s too bad comics aren’t solely concerned with the comedic these days and that they never should have embraced the full spectrum of human experience, mind you — only that it’s a bit of a bummer that in our purportedly “refined” modern age, the idea of a cartoonist who pursues, and excels at, humor somehow isn’t considered, well — serious enough. Or, in a pinch, even worth taking seriously. Comedy is serious business, I tell ya…

One of two semi-recent releases by Daria Tessler from Perfectly Acceptable Press (the other being Accursed, reviewed on this very site just a handful of days ago), the uneconomically-titled Three Magical Recipes From The Book Of Secrets Of Albertus Magnus is not only overflowing with verbiage on the cover, but wonderfully archaic script throughout and, most importantly and essentially, positively inspired artwork that casts a  thoroughly mesmerizing spell all its own on each and every of the book’s 28 riso-printed pages. Insanely colorful, imaginative, and engrossing, this is a project that is entirely what it espouses itself as being, yet also considerably more than anyone could justifiably be pre-disposed to hope for.

Yeah, it really is that good.

Exploding at readers in a kaleidoscopic explosion of red, fluorescent pink, yellow, and a tone of blue classified as “federal,” Tessler’s vibrant and immersive renderings of these, for lack of a…

Even by the low standards of licensed toy properties, the Go-Bots don’t get much respect. Yeah, sure, they’ve had some animation revivals (even, I think, a feature-length film or two of the straight-to-video variety) and some comic books here and there, but a lot of that — while no doubt making their diminished fan base happy —was probably more about keeping IP rights semi-active on the part of Hasbro. No billion-dollar live action blockbusters for these guys. What can you get from them that you can’t get from the Transformers, right?

Leave it to Tom Scioli, one of the most innovative and distinctive cartoonists working today, to give the best answer as to what makes the Go-Bots different from their more celebrated —- uhhmmm — peers : “The Go-Bots bleed,” Scioli tells us on this month’s IDW promotional blurb page. And if you need any more reason than that to…

There’s no adequate way to describe the contents of Canadian cartoonist/fine artist/musician Andrea Lukic’s latest Journal Of Smack (she self-publishes one of these every year or thereabouts) without reaching deep into the stores of one’s own vocabulary and dusting off any number of little-used gems grown atrophied and covered in cobwebs. I determined I was going to resist the urge to go down that road and concentrate on immediate, visceral impressions, but we’ll see how well I do holding to that vow. If you hear me using terms like “abstract singularity” or somesuch, you’ll know I failed.

And with that, it’s down to business —

Lukic’s book has all the aesthetics of a “found object,” its pages somewhat-unevenly glued within one of those cheap DIY quasi-“bindings,” and that’s as it should be : it looks and feels old, haphazard, random. Where does one find something like this? I dunno, but my…

This week, we take a brief side-step away from our usual small-press “turf” to have a quick look at four high-profile mainstream comics now available on your LCS shelves — three are alphas, one’s an omega.

The Green Lantern #1  marks DC’s latest attempt to revive the flagging critical and commercial fortunes of their premier cosmic super-hero, and while the sort of “back-to-basics” approach being undertaken by writer Grant Morrison and artist Liam Sharp may be precisely what the character needs (not having read a contemporary GL story is probably a couple of decades I’m really not in much position to judge), a dose of some sort of ambition would probably go a long way, and this book has precisely zero of that. It’s hard to believe that the same guy responsible for such thought-through and intricate mind-fucks as The Invisibles, The Filth, Flex Mentallo, and Nameless