The day that I write this review, March 20th, 2018, marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of one of the kindest, most sincere, most genuinely good people this country — perhaps even this world — has ever produced. A man for whom the words “legend” and “icon” are, somehow, too small — even though he would no doubt balk at being referred to as either. A man with more genuine compassion and love in his heart than perhaps anyone we’ll ever see in the public sphere again. A man who cared for every child on the planet as if they were his own and who makes me want to believe that there really is a heaven for his soul to have ascended to after his death. I’m speaking, of course, of the singularly brilliant, compassionate, kind, and frankly beautiful (in the truest sense of the word) Fred Rogers, creator…

Was it just me, or did this past week seem particularly loaded with debut issues? I mean, I know Image has at least one new number one every Wednesday, but lately it seems like everybody’s getting in on the act. Here are the four that I read since last we met here —

Eternity Girl #1 is the latest from DC’s Young Animal “pop-up imprint” (whatever the fuck that even means), and anything drawn by Sonny Liew is something I’m gonna buy. Truth be told, I really can’t believe that the cartooning genius behind The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye is even doing a monthly book for one of the “Big Two” publishers — but I’m doubly dumbfounded by the fact that he’s not writing it, as well, since (let’s be honest) you’re not gonna pair him with anybody who’s better at the art of scripting than he is…

There are few cartoonists who get so much from so little as Sophie Yanow. I offer as an example of this assertion  her latest autobio work, the Retrofit/Big Planet-published What Is A Glacier?, which clocks in at just 32 economically-scripted pages, is illustrated in a much looser and more free-flowing style  than her previous (equally exemplary) works — one that puts a premium on extracting maximum emotional “punch” out of each line, whether straight or squiggled — and yet it’s packed with more sheer information, both personal and global, than most comics that are three, even four, times longer. How packed, you might ask? So packed that even after six consecutive readings I’m still trying to figure out whether or not I’ve not so much caught everything, but absorbed it all.

Juxtaposition is our word of the day here, and the brilliant way Yanow utilizes it allows her to…

When no less an authority than legendary indie cartoonist John Porcellino says that a particular book is “as good as comics get,” then said book is clearly worth paying attention to — but also has some very big praise to live up to. Whether that means such a glowing endorsement is actually something of a double-edged I guess I’ll leave to you to determine — shit, if it was my book, I’d take it — but any way you slice it, “as good as comics get” is far more than simple, or even effusive, praise. Indeed, it’s positively glowing.

But, then, so is the book we’re talking about here, Chicago-based cartoonist Alex Nall’s self-published collection Teaching Comics : Volume One. Autobio strips that capture life’s quietly beautiful and poignant moments are nowhere near as “sexy” or “arresting” as autobio confessional stuff, it’s true, but for my money they…

What did I learn this week? I learned that Vertigo-style comics are still alive and well, they’re just not being made by Vertigo anymore —

Case in point : The Highest House #1 re-unites the team of Mike Carey and Peter Gross from The Unwritten at IDW, and their new publisher is clearly pulling out all the stops, publishing this in an oversized magazine-style format with heavy, glossy covers and slick, high-quality paper. The art is certainly worthy of the presentation — Gross’ detailed, intricate illustrations positively sing from the pages, aided and abetted in no small part by the lush, gorgeous color palette of Fabien Alquier, and the story, centered around a slave boy named Moth who works in a Gormenghast-style eccentric magical castle is old-school Vertigo “high fantasy” all the way. The set-up is fairly simple : Moth makes a deal with a potential devil named Obsidian…

One of the crazier things to come down the pipeline in recent months — as well as one of the most endearing — has to be Thu Tran’s Dust Pam, a compact little 72-page Risograph-printed book published by Sweden’s Peow Studio that in many ways defies expectation, classification, perhaps even description. But around these parts we’re pretty goddamn hard-headed, so we never let that stop us from trying —

Presented in various gradations of white, mustard yellow, mouthwash green, and salmon pink, the aesthetics of Tran’s book are as singular as its subject matter : our protagonist is an anthropomorphic dust pan/cat hybrid who’s obsessed with keeping both her home and her workplace (Best Snacks Factory, where she cleans up cheese dust all day) absolutely spotless, but is constantly at war with a veritable army of insects that seem to pop back up as soon as she removes them…

Fair warning at the outset : that question I pose in the headline for this review? I’m not sure I can answer it. But it’s not for lack of trying.

New York-based cartoonist Zach Hazard Vaupen’s Combed Clap Of Thunder (to my knowledge his first “solo” book, his previous material appearing in a handful of multi-creator anthologies) is a comic I’ve been poring and puzzling over since its release by means of the Retrofit/Big Plant Comics publishing partnership six or seven months back. It’s an engrossing work, to be sure, but not one that lends itself to clear-cut analysis. Which isn’t to say that the triptych of thematically-not-dissimilar stories are somehow oblique affairs — in point of fact, while they’re certainly (sorry to invoke the term, but) surreal in terms of execution and expression, they’re relatively straightforward narratives : “The Lonely Autocannibal The Scientist” is an internal monolgue on the…

Looming nuclear war with North Korea! Looming cold war with Russia! Looming trade war with every other country on the planet! What have we got to take our minds off all this potential conflict? Why, comics, of course! And this week offered plenty of distraction — some good, some decidedly less so.

The Beef #1 is the opening salvo in a four-parter from Image that has apparently been in the works for quite some time. Co-writers Richard Starkings and Tyler Shainline, of Elephantmen and Liberty Justice, respectively, join forces with living legend (as far as I’m concerned) Shaky Kane to serve up this story that appears to be part character-study of a lonely middle-aged “nobody,” part examination of small-town generational entrapment, part super-hero parody, and part polemic on the merits of vegetarianism. Kane’s art and colors are, needless to say, absolutely magnificent — larger than life and twice as…

You’ve gotta say this much for Eric Haven — he may wear his influences clearly, obviously, perhaps even proudly on his sleeve (Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Charles Burns, Fletcher Hanks especially), but he filters them all through a singular lens that first blends, then morphs and metastasizes them into a “sort of work” that can well and truly be called his own. Omnipotent otherworldly forces, ancient terrors, Walter Mitty-esque dream lives, mutant super-creatures, high-flying adventuresses, and present-day ennui may seem, at first glance, to be incongruous (to say the least) storytelling tropes when presented in relation to each other, but the sporadically-active cartoonist finds a way to make them all not only work together, but to do so in such a naturalistic fashion that you can’t see them not functioning as precisely-placed elements in a kind of “slow-burn” absurdist crescendo.

That requires a deft touch and a singular commitment to…

No metaphor or hyperbole here — cartoonist Dash Shaw’s 2016 cinematic debut, My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea, is an indie animated feature that’s about exactly what its title claims. And what kid, present or former, didn’t dream about precisely that happening to their high school at least once?

And yet Shaw, in his capacity as writer/director, avoids romanticizing the youthful outsider, as one would assume he’d be inclined to do — in fact, his stand-in protagonist (also named Dash and voiced with considerable range and realism by Jason Schwartzman) comes off as both willfully delusional (he’s convinced that he’s the best writer in the school and that his newspaper is “making a difference” — while also less-than-begrudgingly admitting that he chases after banal gossip stores in an attempt to boost his readership) and, frankly, more than a bit of a jerk. His best friend/good-natured foil, then…