From the best anthology comic in a decade to the best ongoing mini, this week had plenty to offer yours truly. It’s late as I write this, I’m tired, but I’m also enthused to talk comics, so let’s do just that —

I’m not sure what it is about fourth issues of anthologies, but in much the same way that Kramers Ergot #4 threw down the gauntlet and shouted “this is where comics are now, and this is where comics are going — dare you to stop us!” way back in the halcyon days of 2008, editor Eric Reynolds has assembled the very best of the best of veteran and emerging contemporary cartoonists to make much the same declaration here in 2018 with Now #4, which marks not only the (temporary?) pinnacle of this Fantagraphics series to date, but also something of a high-water mark for the anthology format in…

All good things, as they say — and while Noah Van Sciver’s annual (or thereabouts) Fantagraphics-published Fante Bukowski series has been a very good thing indeed, by and large (we’ll get to its “big flaw” in due course), it’s usually a safe bet to wrap up a project before any kind of creative staleness sets in. To that end, then, when I heard that A Perfect Failure : Fante Bukowski Three would mark the final chapter of what what was now officially a trilogy, it sounded to me like the right thing to do — but now that the book has arrived (or, whoops, will arrive soon, this is an advance review, after all), has Van Sciver indeed checked out at the correct time?

Okay, fair enough, Noah himself isn’t “checking out” of cartooning (in point of fact, 2018 has been as busy a year as ever for him…

It feels like it’s been awhile since out Latvian friends at Kus! unleashed a new foursome of Mini Kus! releases an an always-undeserving world, but fear not, they’re back with their latest set (#s 67-70, respectively, priced at $6 each — but I’ll hook you up with a link to buy them all together at a package discount price at the end of this Round-Up column), and I was particularly excited to check these out since they’re all by cartoonists whose work I’m more or less entirely unfamiliar with. Let’s see if they managed to make a fan of this grizzled old comics veteran —

First up is Mariana Pita’s Day Tour, an intriguing little story about the joys of doing nothing versus the sheer effort it takes to do even the most simple things sometimes. It’s an ambiguous tale, and in the end you’re left to wonder whether…

Does anybody really like clowns?

I never have, and I can’t think of any of my friends who do — assuming the subject has ever even come up. My wife damn sure doesn’t like them — in fact, they freak her the fuck out on a core level, and to a degree that most people reserve for things like spiders, or heights. Not that she’s terribly fond of either of those things — but I digress. In any case, my original point, I think, still stands : nobody really likes clowns all that much. So don’t ask me where the old saying “everybody loves a clown” comes from.

I don’t know how Alex Graham feels about clowns, though. It’s hard to tell, even though a veritable gaggle of them are at the center of the latest issue of her solo comic, Cosmic BE-ING #6. They live together in a magical…

It’s a rough old world, and sometimes you’re just in the mood for a good laugh — or, better yet, hundreds of them in glorious, mind-numbing succession. If that sounds like something you could really go for in the face of the relentless onslaught of bad news that reality has become, then congratulations are in order, because you’ve definitely come to the right comics blog — this time, at any rate.

John Kerschbaum is far from the most prolific cartoonist working today (although he’s prone to turn up when and where you least expect it, and never seems to lack for reasonably high-profile gigs), but some things are worth the wait, and the decade between his first Fantagraphics book, the now-legendary Petey & Pussy, and its brand-spanking-new sequel, Petey & Pussy : Puppy Love, appears to have been put to good use, because he’s pulled out all the…

Not to sound too dramatic — or maybe that should be melodramatic — right out of the gate, but it strikes me that any way you look at it, the much-vaunted “age of reason” is over.

Oh, sure, social and political commentators have been telling us at least since the elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency, if not earlier, that we are living in a “post-truth world,” but I think that misses the larger point : things are happening so fast, and they’re coming at us from so many directions simultaneously, that for many, it’s simply flat-out impossible to determine what the truth even is anymore.

Consider, if you will : in Dez Vylenz’ intriguing-if-flawed documentary The Mindscape Of Alan Moore, the noted comics author and occultist opines that human culture was essentially analogous with ice for the first x-million years of our existence as a species…

Picking right back up where we left off last week, our foursome this time around includes the last two issues of Robert Sergel’s Bald Knobber, as well as two more recent comics by our man of the hour, Joe Bonaparte and September 12th And Other Stories.

The major revelation that came at the tail end of the previous issue gives rise to a secret and uneasy truce between Cole and the individual who burned down his mother’s home in Bald Knobber #5 (how’s that for assiduously avoiding anything that could be labeled a “spoiler”?), but the underlying tension between our troubled (and troubling) protagonist and the author of his sorrows (some of ’em, at any rate) ends up momentarily usurped from the foreground thanks to the return of a former nemesis out for his pound of flesh. I remarked in my previous Round-Up column that the…

Let’s be honest : DC has attempted something like a half-dozen or so re-launches of their once-venerable Vertigo line over the last decade-plus, and they’ve all run out of gas — usually sooner rather than later. Something about their latest attempt at a “do-over,” though, feels a little bit different.

Maybe it’s because they’ve re-named the imprint “DC Vertigo.” Maybe it’s because it coincides with the label’s 25th anniversary. Maybe it’s because it’s anchored by a slew of Sandman spin-off titles boasting at least a modicum of involvement from Neil Gaiman himself. Or maybe it’s because the new creator-owned books they’re launching more-or-less in conjunction with The Sandman Universe appear to have a unifying ethos of some sort behind them (politically aware, by authors either entirely or relatively new to the comics medium, many hailing from creative backgrounds bordering on the exotic), as well as some actual promotional muscle.

Case…

Granted, we’re skirting the definition of “Eurocomics” a bit with this one given that Max de Rodigues’ Bastard was originally serialized in mini-comics form by an American publisher (specifically Chuck Forsman’s Oily Comics), but de Rodigues hails from Belgium and brings a decided “outsider’s perspective” to a couple of classic slices of Americana, namely the sprawling landscape of the Southwest and the venerable “criminals on the run” take on the larger “road movie” genre, so forgive me stretching the category out a bit to —“but wait!,” I hear you say, “This isn’t a movie!”

Says you. And while you’re absolutely right on a purely technical level, in point of fact, this new graphic novel collection of de Rodigues’ complete story from Fantagraphics (several pages of which appear to have been either completely re-drawn, or substantially “tightened up” with new, thicker, more fluid inks) plays out with all the pacing…