It goes without saying that whenever somebody reasonably well-known from another field of creative endeavor entirely “makes the leap” over to comics, a certain hardened, crusty rump of fandom will view said transition (however temporary) with suspicion. Less so, I’m guessing, when it’s a literary personage like, I dunno, Stephen King or something, than when it’s a musician, since there’s nothing in a musician’s background to indicate that they should be good at this sort of thing — but it’s still a tad bit unfair to automatically assume that there’s some sort of artistic “carpet-bagging” going on when that happens, simply because the standard doesn’t seem to cut both ways. Did anyone object to Alan Moore recording some albums, for example? I didn’t think so.

In that respect, then, Canadian cartoonist Nick Thorburn — best known as musical “frontman” of both The Unicorn and Islands, as well as floating in…

Continuing our focus on books that I scored at Autoptic 2018 a couple Sundays back, this week we’re going to take a look at the first four issues or Robert Sergel’s six-part Bald Knobber mini-comics series, which I will duly “spoil” the final verdict on right now : these impressed the hell out of me. Why? Let’s find out —

Welcome to the book report from hell! In Bald Knobber #1, we meet our protagonist, a kid from BF, Missouri named Cole who, at first glance, doesn’t seem too terribly different from any number of alienated/disaffected youths populating the pages of, say, a million and one Charles Forsman comics — on his best day he seems like another so-called “incel” waiting to happen, on his worst he seems like the type who might shoot up the school. On this day, however, he’s been compelled to share his summer reading with…

Note : Here’s another review recently done for Daniel Elkin’s Your Chicken Enemy website. This one went through several changes and revisions along the way, and is presented here in its “first-draft” stage in order for you, should you desire, to do the old “compare-and-contrast” thing. Personally, I like both versions quite a bit, but I do think the final version is more lean, concise, and smartly-presented, no question. As always, the power of a good editor should never be underestimated!

The “final version,” should you have the time and/or inclination to give it a whirl, is available for your edification here : http://www.danielelkin.com/2018/08/no-solid-ground-ryan-carey-reviews.html

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Where do your ideas come from?

It’s the most basic question, of course, and one that all novelists, artists, filmmakers, poets, and cartoonists (among others) hear all the time. I would imagine it must get pretty frustrating — after all, it’s both the easiest and…

Call me a glutton for punishment if you must, but the rather “blah” feeling that the latest installment in Nigel Bach’s Bad Ben series left me with got the wheels in what passes for my “mind” spinning — “these one-man ‘found footage’ horrors, they’re a tricky thing to pull off,” I thought to myself, “and Bach, who’s had what passes for ‘success’ with this sort of thing, well, he must have spawned some imitators, right? I mean, theoretically at least, anybody with a camera of any sort, even just an iPhone, can do what he’s done (not that they should, mind you), but has anyone else actually given it a shot? I guess if there’s one place I could find similar productions, it would have to be Amazon Prime, would it not? So — do they have anything remotely similar?”

Okay, so my thoughts weren’t that well-organized or succinctly-stated…

“In a town like Twin Peaks,” the promotional advertisements for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me informed us, “no one is innocent.”

Of course, when his foolishly-lambasted masterpiece (for my money, at any rate) hit theaters back in 1992, Lynch had already made something of a career out of exposing the dark underbelly of the American myth — whether he was shining an uncomfortable light on the shadows cast by the apple pie exterior of small-town life in Blue Velvet, or exploring the corrosive pressure applied by pop culture iconography on the socially-and-economically-marginalized in Wild At Heart, he had staked out a viewpoint (to say nothing of a distinctly surreal style) all his own by the time he finally guided us through Laura Palmer’s harrowing final days.

Cartoonist Alex Nall, by contrast — who mines certain similar thematic veins in his latest Kilgore Books graphic…

Note : This is the original, unedited version of a piece I wrote For Daniel Elkin’s Your Chicken Enemy website. As always, I share this here in case interested parties, should such a thing exist, wish to compare the “rough draft” with the finished piece. Mr. Elkin always provides valuable input and suggestions that I think improve things considerably, and if you do read them both back to back, or side by side, or whatever, I’m confident that you’ll agree.

The final, published version is available for your perusal at http://www.danielelkin.com/2018/08/why-art-indeed-ryan-carey-reviews.html

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“Art is always about ‘something hidden.’ But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it.”

So begins anarchist theorist John Zerzan’s widely-discussed (in some circles, at any rate) essay “The Case Against Art.” Zerzan, being one of the leading scholars and spokespeople of the “anarcho-primitivist,” or “Green Anarchist” movements…

Still coming down from the small-press extravaganza that was Autoptic 2018, I am nevertheless ready to buckle in and spend the next X-number of Weekly Reading Round-Up columns surveying many of the fine wares I scored from various cartoonists at the festival. First up, we’re keeping things local (as we damn well should) by looking at some comics from Minneapolis’ own Sean Knickerbocker and M.S. Harkness —

Rust Belt #3 is another fine entry in Knickerbokcer’s occasionally-produced solo series, and while it’s been pointed out by many minds greater than I that Mr. K’s cartooning style bears more than a passing resemblance to that of fellow CCS alum Charles Forsberg, for my money, at any rate, his approach to illustration is slightly more considered and pared-down simultaneously, which is highly apropos from a thematic perspective in that his concerns tend to gravitate toward and around a more mature and less…

If writer/director/actor Nigel Bach — the pride of Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey — holds true to form, eventually he’ll see this review, and won’t be able to resist leaving a snarky, self-congratulatory, vaguely passive-aggressive comment on it. How do I know this? Allow me to explain —

When I hacked out a fairly positive write-up of Bach’s first film, Bad Ben, I didn’t hear a peep from the guy — but when I wrote a negative review of his next one, Steelmanville Road : A Bad Ben Prequel, he stopped by and “congratulated” me on my “little blog,” boasted about how well his movies were doing, and implied that I’d never achieve as much with my life as he has with his. Then he “thanked” me for my time and effort, and that was that. Honestly, it was enough to make me not want to like the…

Say what you will for Alex Graham — and it better be good, or you’ll answer to me — she’s nothing if not absolutely dedicated to her work.

Consider the single-minded determination with which she pursued getting her first long-form graphic novel, Angloid, recently unleashed on an undeserving world from Kilgore Books, to the point it’s at now : she serialized roughly half of the installments that make up the whole of the volume in her self-published comics ‘zine, the always-staggering Cosmic BE-ING; concurrently released the other half as a series of stand-alone comics; collected and published the entirety under her own auspices (not to mention out of her own pocket); and then got herself a “proper” publisher and re-released the whole thing complete with a snazzy photo cover of a clay sculpture she craeted just for the occasion.

Whew! Did you follow all that? Would you have the…

This week’s Round-Up is going up early because this weekend, which is when I usually writing these things, is all about Autoptic 2018, the latest iteration of the Twin Cities’ premier bi-annual small press comics/indie publications show, and so I’m going to be too damn busy buying and reading a whole bunch of new comics to have any time to write about them. Fortunately, I’ve got plenty of good stuff to talk about already this week thanks to Minneapolis’ own David Tea, who was very appreciative of my review of his Five Perennial Virtues #2 — so appreciative, in fact, that he hooked me up with some more of his comics, and I supplemented his generous “donation to the cause” by reading a couple others that he has available via Amazon. Let’s have a look :

Magic Horses is a bumper-sized reprint volume of issues five and seven of