The whole package — you probably know it when you see it.

So, let’s run this hypothetical by you, shall we? You encounter a book with lavish, surreal, jaw-dropping art, presented in full, rich, eye-popping color. It features 18 pages, and a 26-inch center foldout, all riso-printed on heavy-duty recycled paper. The cover boasts foil-press embossing and a die-cut “window,” and the binding is hand-stitched, complete with beads and bells in the upper corner. Would that sound like the proverbial “whole package” to you? It would to me.

And that’s precisely what Daria Tessler’s remarkable Accursed, released earlier this year by the modern masters of truly deluxe small-press publishing at Chicago’s own Perfectly Acceptable Press, is.

Still, it’s all for naught if the contents of said publication don’t manage to live up to — hell, don’t prove themselves worthy of — their magnificent presentation. Especially when the asking price…

The past is another country — except when it isn’t.

Noah Van Sciver has long been one of the undisputed modern masters of autobio comics, to the extent that even his most famous fictional character, Fante Bukowski (whose trilogy of books recently concluded with A Perfect Failure — reviewed a few weeks back on this very site) is obviously liberally populated with (admittedly exaggerated) people, places, and events from his own life — but a close look at one’s upbringing and how it continues to inform life right up to the present day, well, that’s quite a thematic evolution from, say, My Hot Date and similar works, is it not?

Which isn’t meant as a slight against his earlier, Ignatz-winning work, mind you — anything but! That comic more than earned its near-universal praise. But how the kid we met in its pages grew into the man we’ve seen in…

This week I was mightily impressed by comics both very familiar and anything but, and since I’m feeling slightly adventurous we’ll start with the “anything but” part of the equation —

Sufficiently intrigued by Philadelphia-based cartoonist George Wylesol’s mysterious, abstract, and multi-layered Avery Hill book Ghosts, Etc. last year to give a couple of his self-published minis a go (belatedly, I admit, but hey, I’ve been busy), 2017’s Porn stands out as the “must-buy” item of the two that I did, in fact, buy. Eight bucks is admittedly a bit spendy for what you get here in terms of physical product, but it more than carries its weight thematically, artistically, even philosophically. A series of disparate, perhaps even discarnate, drawings paired with coolly bland texts expounding upon vaguely harrowing scenarios with a disturbing level of clinical detachment, this is astonishingly confident stuff with an utterly unique point…

If you’ve been following the comics mainstream on social media (particularly Twitter and YouTube) at any point over the past year or two — particularly if “industry drama” is your thing — there’s no way you’ve been able to avoid at least a few passing references to a purported “movement” calling itself “comicsgate.” More than likely, you’ve picked up on the fact that there is plenty of controversy attendant with it, as well, but what it even is — well, that depends on who you ask.

While those who have little to no time for “comicsgate” view it as an inherently reactionary cesspool of retrograde social and aesthetic sensibilities complete with all the racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry you’d depressingly expect from such a, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” to those who have either aligned themselves with it or are sympathetic to its…

Who better than a multi-talented, groundbreaking, artistic visionary to provide the definitive analysis of — a multi-talented, groundbreaking, artistic visionary?

The answer is as obvious as the question itself, I suppose, and it’s for that reason that James Romberger’s just-released (by means of his own Ground Zero Books self-publishing imprint) Steranko : The Self-Created Man stands out immediately as the authoritative work on the art and legacy of its subject — the iconoclastic, in many respects enigmatic, Jim Steranko : carny escape artist, comics innovator, cinematic conceptualizer, frankly peerless genre-novel cover artist, trailblazing publisher, and raconteur par excellence.

Not that every aspect of the man whose own “real-life” exploits formed the basis of Jack Kirby’s legendary Mister Miracle character comes in for equal treatment in this slim, easily-digestible volume, mind you : this is a book makes no pretenses toward being an absolutely comprehensive biography, nor would such…

For more years than I care to admit, I was a compulsive moviegoer. I can kid myself and say it was all in pursuit of material for my Trash Film Guru blog (still a going concern, although now only updated a couple/few times a month as opposed to all the fucking time), but who do I think I’m fooling? The simple truth of the matter is that I was hooked on the entire experience of heading out to the theater, micro-analyzing whatever film I happened to be seeing, and then coming home and cranking out a review for the edification of whoever happened to be reading, as well as for myself. The bus or train ride home was where I’d get my thoughts together and begin to plan out both what I was going to say and how I was going to say it, and in time I began…

I have this recurring dream —

I’m in a dense, completely unfamiliar and frankly kind of foreboding, forest, very little daylight penetrating through the thick overgrowth, mysterious and even pained animal calls filling the oppressively humid air — except when I begin to follow one of them to its source, I find it’s not an animal call at all, but instead the sound of a smoking, malfunctioning piece of industrial machinery, and that I’m not in a forest as I had thought, but rather in a dilapidated, disused, crumbling factory.

All of which probably a) tells you more about the hopelessly warped contents of my id than you ever cared to know, and b) doesn’t have a whole ton to do with the comic we’re here to talk about, Anders Nilsen’s Tongues #2. Except —

In my dream, I find out that I’m not where I thought I was, and…

There’s no road map for this series. It eschews all comparison, not so much as a matter of design or intent, but simply because cartoonist Richard Alexander pays absolutely no heed to anyone else’s arbitrarily-imposed “rules” and, as a result, his Richy Vegas Comics is utterly without peer — and frankly even belies very little by way of outside influence. It is the product of a singular aesthetic vision, and speaks in its own self-created visual language.

Which probably sounds like a real mouthful when describing what is ostensibly “yet another” autobio comic. But don’t let’s categorize this so simply. Alexander, after all, operates in a format no one else does — he literally draws on paper plates, and the end result is oversized, spiral-bound comics that engage in a type of hermetically-sealed storytelling specifically suited to this particular format. Each page, in fact, is a self-contained “universe” unto itself, even…

If there’s one thing I find suspect about any number of autobio/memoir comics, it’s how specific they tend to be. On the one hand, of course, I get it : the impetus to cobble together disjointed instances and events into a cohesive, “A-to-B” narrative is natural enough, and logic dictates that it makes for interesting, even compelling, reading. Accuracy be damned, as long as the general gist of things is presented  more or less as it happened, that’s the important thing, right? And yet —

Memory doesn’t really work that way, does it? Specifics get lost over time, while the overall character of a given memory tends to swell, even magnify. Events that followed tend to “backtrack” and inform the way we remember things that came before. Time-frames get muddled. People do and say things they possibly never did. The past takes on a dreamlike quality the further we get…

There’s no nice way to put it, but deep in our hearts we all know it to be true : when we’re dead, we’re fucking worm food. We’ve got entire belief systems centered on convincing us that’s not the case, of course, and selling life after death is a multi-billion-dollar industry, but ask the most devout Christian/Muslim/Jew/Hindu/whatever, in their most sincere moment, whether or not their faith is any sort of guarantee, and they’ll admit it’s not — and that they just sorta hope they’re right.

Now, whether or not there’s a “God” is another question, and probably one you’re not interested in knowing my opinion on, but fortunately we’re not here to talk about my conception of what the creator of the universe is or isn’t like, may or may not be, etc. — nor how he/she/it runs this whole “afterlife” thing — we’re here to talk about…