Italian cartoonist Manuele Fior now calls Paris home, but his publishing home is clearly Fantagraphics, who released his breakthrough graphic novels 5,000 KM Per Second and its equally stunning follow-up, The Interview, in 2016 and 2017, respectively, and are now making it three books in three years with their collection of a decade’s worth of his best short strips, Blackbird Days, which is at the very least a showcase for Fior’s incredible artistic and authorial versatility, but at its best is something altogether more.

Case in point : the volume’s longest (and titular) piece bears no direct narrative connection to The Interview, but is clearly set in the same just-slightly-askew world and uses the story of its troubled protagonist — an engineer on the precipice of getting busted for a “white-collar” crime — to set the stage for an intriguingly oblique mini-mystery, but also to lend weight…

The following is a piece (of what, I leave up to your determination) originally written for Daniel Elkin’s Your Chicken Enemy website, and I’m presenting it here in its original, unedited form so that, if you’re so inclined, you can compare the two versions and see what a significant difference a good editor — which Mr. Elkin most certainly is, and then some — can make in terms of whipping a review into fighting shape. Enjoy — and buy this book, it’s pretty damn incredible!

The final version of the review is available here : http://www.danielelkin.com/2018/04/prepare-to-meet-your-maker-ryan-carey.html

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What do you do when you absolutely love a comic, but think it’s undercut by things entirely outside the parameters of the story and art itself?

Ho Che Anderson’s Godhead Volume One (a second is apparently on the way next year, fingers crossed) is a work of borderline-brilliant dystopian sci-fi, a logical extrapolation…

Anthologies, surreal vegetarian polemics, and smarter-than-average TV tie-ins abound, so let’s jump right in —

A haunting and frankly topical cover from the great Al Columbia kicks off  Now #3, and as we’ve quickly come to expect, editor Eric Reynolds has assembled a first-rate selection of cartoonists from around the globe in the pages within. Standout selections from this issue are Eleanor Davis’ psychologically and sexually complex “March Of The Penguins,” Dash Shaw’s soul-baring “Crowd Chatter,” Nathan Cowdry’s unsettling “Deliver Me/Sweet Baby,” Nah Van Sciver’s amusingly ironic (and that takes skill at this point, believe me) “Wolf Nerd,” Anna Haifisch’s unapologetically straightforward “A Proud Race,” Keren Ketz’s beautiful, elegiac “My Summer At The Fountain Of Fire And Wonder,” and Roberta Scomparsa’s disturbing and all-too-real “The Jellyfish,” but for my money (and at $10 for 120 pages you won’t be complaining about how you spent yours here) the absolute revelation is Anne…

Just when I thought the MCU might be getting somewhere —

About the only person more surprised by just how fucking much I loved Black Panther than a regular reader of this site was — well, me, but love it to pieces I did, and it’s an opinion I still stand behind 100% and then some. I’m not sure how much of the credit for its artistic success is down to the studio “suits” simply allowing Ryan Coogler to do something different, to break the mold, and how much was him actively wanting to while other directors remain content to serve up more of the same, but whatever the case may be, it was the first Marvel Studios flick that had a distinct look, feel, and personality all its own. It stood out, then, not just for its frankly profound cultural significance, but for its ambition and its quality. It…

If 2017 was the “year of the woman” in comics — and I would contend that, thanks to the exemplary efforts of Emil Ferris, Eleanor Davis, Mimi Pond, Gabrielle Bell, Jillian Tamaki, Sophia Foster-Dimino, November Garcia, Annie Koyama and numerous others it most certainly was — then 2018 may just prove to be the “year of the trans woman.” We’ve already had Tommi Parrish’s incredible  graphic novel The Lie And How We Told It, a bold and confident statement of artistic intent that has elevated Parrish into the top tier of contemporary cartoonists, and just a couple of months on from that comes The Pervert, a collection of collaborative strips by writer Michelle Perez and artist Remy Boydell, originally serialized in Brandon Graham’s Island anthology, that gain new weight and heft and import when presented in their entirety, as Image Comics has done here. Part character study, part…

One book understandably sucked all the oxygen out of the room this week, and we’ll dive right into it first, but fear not, there are a few others worth talking about, as well —

So, look, let’s just call it like it is : Action Comics  #1000 is an eight-dollar victory lap. A “double milestone” book celebrating both the fact that it’s the first American comic to hit the four-digit-issue-number mark, as well as the 80th anniversary of Superman’s first appearance, you go in figuring you’re in for plenty of self-congratulation here, and yeah, it’s essentially 80 pages of DC’s top creators, past and present, paying tribute to the company’s number one character (sorry, Bat-fans). Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster get the “80-Page Giant” dedicated to them, as well they should, but don’t come in for much mention anywhere else within its pages, which feels like a bit of a…

Maybe I got overloaded on micro-budget horror back in October when I plumbed the depths of Amazon Prime’s offerings in the sub-genre for my customary “Halloween Month” reviews, maybe I’m just too damn busy at work to follow all of my interests (cinematic or otherwise) lately, or maybe trying to build up a solid backlog of content on my new(-ish) comics blog is eating up every spare moment I have for writing so I’m just not watching as many movies since I don’t have as much time to write about them — I dunno, but whatever the case may be, it had been a good few months since I’d watched a cheap-ass indie fright flick, and their absence from my existence was starting to be felt on, like, a goddamn cellular level. Something needed to be done.

So, yeah, last night I ended my impromptu fast and returned to combing…

I’ve been going back to Nathan Ward’s Warpwish Comix #1 (I checked, and no matter how the logo may appear to you, that is the cartoonist’s preferred spelling of the title) every week of two since he self-published it in magazine format (on old-school newsprint no less, hooray for that!) at the tail end of 2016, trying my level best to decipher it. To plumb its depths or, failing that, to at least limn the boundaries of its hermetically-sealed internal — well, not logic, but maybe ethos. To figure out both what was happening in it and why. Spoiler alert — it hasn’t been easy.  And I’m pretty sure I’ve failed on all counts.

Indeed, all I can really be certain of, even after all this time, is that just because Ward is from Cleveland (where he’s been active in a number of punk bands over the…

It’s all been leading up to this : four years in the making, the sixth and final installment of Johnny Ryan’s formerly-annual (or thereabouts) paean to thoughtless juvenalia, Prison Pit, is upon us courtesy of Fantagraphics Books, and while it’s frankly impossible to conceive of anyone feeling in any way “attached” to protagonist Cannibal Fuckface, much less to the batshit crazy universe he calls home, it’s equally been impossible to conceive of any of the gleefully depraved hyper-violence, horrifyingly sick sex, and/or both that have appeared on pretty much every page of this series since his inception — impossible for anyone but Ryan, mind you.

Which is, of course, precisely how it should be. Ryan boxed himself into a corner with this project from the outset, it seems to me — he literally had no choice but to consistently “one-up” himself, otherwise what the fuck was the point? —…

Three first issues and a seven hundredth? Yeah, this oughtta be an interesting column —

Crude #1 kicks off a new Skybound/Image six-parter from the creative team of Steve Orlando and Garry Brown revolving around a mix of family drama and Russian oil business shady dealings, with some sort of vague-at-this-point mystery thrown into the mix to — sorry — muddy the waters. Orlando has always been an up-and-down writer in my estimation, but he seems to be more “up” here, serving us a script that’s heavy on the characterization and stage-setting. This may just turn out to be yet another revenge yarn, but those are fun if they kick enough ass, and all indications are that this one’ll do just that — and Brown’s murky, expressionistic art is more than well-suited to the proceedings. At $3.99 a pop for singles this might be one to “trade-wait,” but since I’m…