I’m trying, I really am, but Henriette Valium’s 2016 Conundrum Press-published, oversized (9 x 14, to be specific), hardback collection, The Palace Of Champions, confounds me at every turn. And yes, I do mean that as a compliment.

For one thing, it’s essentially impossible to discern where one strip “ends” in this book and another “begins,” but maybe that doesn’t really matter, because it’s not exactly easy to puzzle out what’s even happening in any given panel, let alone on an entire page. Valium’s illustrations are loaded with information — hell, worlds of it — and seem to operate outside the realms of time, space, and logic, to the point where they may even render such concepts outmoded at best, if not downright meaningless. Assaulting your eyeballs and sense of reason with equal gusto, Valium takes elements of old-school underground comix “ugly art,” occult and Kabbalistic diagrams, and…

It’s just as well, I think, that pretty much nothing of any interest hit comic store shelves this week, because the other day I received a package from Latvian publisher Kus! (pronounced “Kush,” if you’re wondering) containing their latest “four-pack” of minis, and every single one of these deserves some attention. We’re gonna give them just that, but first, the particulars —

For those either not, or only vaguely, in the know, Kus! has been at it for just over ten years now, producing unique, top-quality, idiosyncratic comics from the best talent, both established and emerging, from around the globe, and their Mini Kus! line is no exception. Forget what you know, in fact, about the production values for standard mini-comics, as these are each 24 pages in length, printed in full and lavish color on superb paper between heavy-duty, cardstock covers. Production values simply don’t come any better than…

Brian Canini is one of those cartoonists who isn’t afraid to dabble his hand (and pencil, and ink pot, and — you get the idea) into any number of different genres to see what he comes up with — in fact, at this very moment he’s got a sci-fi mini (Plastic People), a diary comics series (Glimpses Of Life), and an indescribably weird-but-fun gag strip thing (Blirps), going on. That’s about as wide a variety as one can imagine, and while nay-sayers may charge that this means he has yet to find a “consistent voice” or somesuch, “glass-half-full”-types such as myself (no, really!) look at this as proof positive that he’s unafraid to experiment, to cast a wide net as he continues to hone is skills. To date, though, his longest sustained serialized story has been the recently-concluded Ruffians, a comic that actually…

I’ve been up there, so I know : Prince Edward Island is a serene, pastoral place, largely dependent on agriculture and Anne Of Green Gables-based tourism for its economic survival. The pace of life is slow and seasonally-dictated; communities are so tightly-knit, and the families there go back so long, that you often hear remarkably different accents from one town to the next; cars travel at slow speeds along two-lane roads; crime is nearly non-existent. It’s like Vermont on steroids — yeah, sure, they’ve got high-speed internet now, but apart from that, life hasn’t changed a whole lot in the last, oh, hundred years or so.

Of course this is the sort of place that would produce a cartoonist with the most bleak, nihilistic, and uncompromising vision of the future committed to paper in recent memory. That’s just the way things work, isn’t it? That’s the natural way of…

Happy New Year everyone, hope your 2018 got off to a rousing start, certainly the comic-book world seems primed to have a good year if the way things have started off is any indication —

It’s no secret to anyone following my writing, here or elsewhere, that DC’s line of licensed Hanna-Barbera comics has been something I’ve been singing the praises of pretty much since they made their debut nearly two years back, and trust me when I say that no one’s more surprised about that than I am given that most of these cartoons hold precisely zero nostalgic value for me and the overwhelming majority of DC’s publishing output is creatively worthless. Still, the free reign they’ve been giving to some of their best freelancers to “re-imagine” these moribund properties has paid off big time, and to date the absolute cream of the crop has been Mark Russell and…

There are those who think that autobiographical comics are essentially over and done with, and in darker moments of my past I confess to having perhaps felt that way myself, but in recent years cartoonists such as Noah Van Sciver, November Garcia, Mimi Pond, and Max Clotfelter — to name just a few — have done much to re-invigorate a genre that, for many years, Gabrielle Bell and John Porcellino were essentially carrying on their shoulders after the ’90s autobio boom went bust. Now, I would suggest, it’s time to add the name of Sarah Romano Diehl to the list of the new wave of illustrators who have found that the most fertile creative ground to exercise their considerable storytelling “chops” on is to be found within their own lives.

The Seattle-based Diehl has done some interesting travelogue minis in her time, but with Crust, her new self-published memoir…

Way back when the world still made some small degree of sense — in 2013, to be specific — iconoclastic cartoonist Dan Zettwoch put out the first of what was promised to be a trilogy of minis called Cut-Away Comics. Or maybe the title was going to be an ongoing concern, and it was just the current story, “Tree Swallows,” that was going to be three parts in length, then he’d continue the comic with a new story after that one was done? It was hard to say.

And soon enough, the distinction became an academic one, because even by the uneven publication “standards” of independent minis, Cut-Away Comics was a “you’ll get it when you get it” affair, and Zettwoch’s readership just had to learn to be happy whenever we got something new from him. The second 12-page installment came out a year later, and the third and…

This oughtta be simple enough — Sean Baker’s The Florida Project is every bit as good as you’ve heard.

Okay, that’s it, my job’s done — Happy New Year, everybody.

But wait just a second —

You wanna know why. I swear, everybody always wants to know why. And, hey, I can’t say as I blame you — movie tickets don’t come cheap these days and one is forced to choose wisely. I was sold on seeing this from the outset (even if it took me awhile to get my ass to the theater), being a huge fans of Baker’s 2015 shot-on-an-iPhone effort Tangerine, and this time around I was curious to see what he could/would do with some real actors, actual cameras, and a whopping two million dollar budget. Would he “sell out”? Or would he stay true to himself even though the ever-elusive “big time”…

I had this nice column all ready to go for you folks this week. We were gonna talk about Chuck Forsman’s Slasher. We were gonna talk about the final issue of Kamandi Challenge. We were gonna talk about the latest magnificent story from Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill in Cinema Purgatorio. We were gonna talk about Simon Hanselmann’s Performance broadsheet. And then a couple of things happened.

The first involves the pathetic aging hipster pictured above, who you’ve probably already guessed, based on his appearance alone, works for Vice. In fact, he’s their art editor, and his name is Nick Gazin. Before we go any further, take a look at this lazy fucking column he wrote : https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paqaxk/the-ten-best-comics-of-2017

You’re back? Okay, good. Yes, according to Mr. Handlebar Mustache, only eight good comics came out in all of 2017. Three of them were reprints. One was a…

It’s always a dicey proposition when you’re reviewing a new Star Wars flick. One way or another, you almost can’t win — I recall, for instance, my lukewarm review of Star Wars : The Force Awakens being met with a comment stating, I shit you not, that “I agree with all your criticisms, but you should have given it a positive review anyway.” When I asked, naturally, why the hell my review should have been more sunny even though all my criticisms were legit, said individual responded, I assume with a straight face, something to the effect of “well, it’s more difficult to write a positive review than a negative one, so you should challenge yourself more.”

If I had any sense, I would have just walked away at that point, perhaps with a quip like “it’s only ‘more difficult’ to write a positive review of a film when said…