A varied and disparate selection of books came my way this week, some easy enough to find, others decidedly less so —

And on the “decidedly less so” front, we’ve got legendary auto-didact Mark Beyer’s Ne’er-Do-Wellers, a limited-as-hell (as in 200 signed and numbered copies) new publication that comes to us by way of Trapset Zines and was issued in conjunction with the opening of a new gallery show of Beyer’s work. Not so much a “comic” per se as a series of illustrations accompanying reports of particularly strange and sometimes brutal crimes that took place in recent years in Beyer’s hometown of Albuquerque, N.M., this is as stark a distillation of absurdity, deadpan humor, and pessimism for humanity as a whole as you’re probably expecting, and certainly Beyer’s unique-unto-himself style of illustration is every bit as much a dark joy for the eyes as it’s always been, but…

In my never-ending quest to find something new worth following on a month-to-month basis, I’ve taken a flier on a few recent Image first issues in the last couple of weeks, and in between the ones I decided to throw the towel in on immediately (No. 1 With A Bullet) and those I’ve decided to stick with on a tentative basis (Port Of Earth), there was one definite standout that hooked me from the outset and didn’t let go and/or up : writer Sean Lewis and standout newcomer artist Caitlin Yarsky’s Coyotes.

So, yeah, that’s the “plot” of this review given away right out of the gate, I suppose, but what the hell, let’s talk about why I felt this was $3.99 well-spent and why I think you should sink your hard-earned cash into it, as well, shall we? I think we shall.

Yarsky’s stunning…

I know, I know — at this point there’s pretty much nothing about director Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 that hasn’t already been said, but here I am anyway, chiming in with my two cents’ worth long after whatever admittedly slight amount of relevance my opinion might have to prospective viewers has long since left the building. Still, I wanna talk about it anyway, and there’s a good reason for that :

I was, you see, a skeptic when it came to this flick. I was less impressed with Arrival than I was apparently meant to be, I saw no actual need for this sequel, and unlike its celluloid progenitor it’s not based on anything Philip K. Dick actually wrote, so — at most, I was figuring it would be alright. Hopefully it wouldn’t detract from the legacy of the original. But no way did I figure it would prove…

Diary comics can be a tricky thing to review simply because they’re at sort of a “middle stage” in their overall development these days — originally designed purely as an eyes-only exercise to keep cartoonists “sharp” either between, or alongside, “real”projects intended for public consumption, at some point a handful of artists, most notably Gabrielle Bell, began to take them and mold them into something like cohesive overall narratives, and in that sense it’s probably fair to say that they just might represent the next logical evolution of autobiographical comics as a whole.

And yet, by and large, more often than not a cartoonist’s raw sketchbook diary pages are usually just posted as premiums for their Patreon subscribers (see Bell again, as well as Tillie Walden, and who-knows-who-else by now) or collected as print-on-demand jobs (see Gabby Schulz’ recent A Process Of Drastically Reducing One’s Expectations). To that end…

When you combine the talents of a first-rate print journalist and an Eisner-nominated political cartoonist, chances are better than good that the end result will be something pretty damn great — especially when the topic under their collective microscope is equal parts relevant and disturbing — but then, we’ve seen highly respected people from outside the comics field come up short when they’ve decided to “slum it” in our little medium of choice before, so I guess I went into Pratap Chatterjee and Khalil (or, if you prefer, Khalil Bendib)’s new Metropolitan Books-published graphic novel (a term that actually applies in this case), Verax (Latin for “truth-teller”), with a sense of what we’ll call “cautious optimism.” I had little doubt that this “true history of whistleblowers, done warfare, and mass surveillance” would be interesting — but would it also be good?

Chatterjee, for his part, had a front-row seat…

What captured my attention this week — for good, ill, or somewhere in-between —

One day before the great Steve Ditko turned 90 years old (and here’s to 90 more!), I received my copy of #26, the latest in the now-decade-long “32-Page Series” published by Ditko and Robin Snyder (and bearing, curiously, a 2018 copyright date, making this the first comic I’ve ever received from the future) and funded via yet another successful Kickstarter campaign. As always it’s a thoroughly intriguing, and at times near-impenetrable, affair that highlights the fascinating creative tension that’s arisen between intention and execution in latter-period Ditko works, to wit —

It seems that Ditko has made a conscious effort to boil everything down to the most pure and distilled iteration of his Objectivist philosophy possible, adopting a decidedly minimalist approach to both scripting and illustration, and yet the end result is a series of…

“But he SUCCEEDED, you fools! I’m DEAD! THAT’S why he must be punished! BECAUSE HE SUCCEEDED!”

“THIS — it’s ALMOST funny — when you think of it — HA HA — it’s silly — really.”

“GORDON? How did you survive the fall? ” “Good nutrition. Regular bowel movements. What do you use?”

“So — the sensei killed you not, swine. I knew it!”

Oh, yeah — dialogue that cringe-worthy can only mean one thing : Neal Adams is back!

Not content that his brand of narrative insanity has been well-represented enough in recent years with the flat-out indescribable Batman Odyssey and Superman : The Coming Of The Supermen, the one-time master is back, and back on one of his signature characters no less, in the new six-part Deadman mini-series from DC. You know what that means, right? Buckle in, because this shit is gonna get nuts.

Heck, truth be…

For the final entry in our look at some of the lesser-seen (and even lesser-budgeted) flicks available for your Halloween viewing pleasure via Amazon Prime’s streaming service, we come to a curious, and often fascinating, little number called The Grinn, which was filmed earlier this year in Pacific Grove, California for (at least as IMDB would have it) the king’s ransom of precisely $300.

And, honestly, in may ways it shows : the sound quality can be uneven, some of the camera angles are a bit suspect, and the script is obviously an amateur effort with some real pacing problems — but here’s the kicker : it’s both inventive and surprising enough that you’ll likely be more than willing to overlook its production and plotting flaws.

And speaking of  the plot, here’s a brief, reasonably-“spoiler”-free rundown : A guy named Vance (played by John Carroll) wakes up with no…

Hey, it wouldn’t be a Halloween on Amazon Prime without a new film from our guy Ryan Callaway to check out, would it?

Of course not, and just the other day his latest popped up on there — Messenger Of Wrath, which “wrapped” production just a few short weeks ago and marks something of a departure in the veteran micro-budget auteur‘s output in that it’s the first time, at least to my knowledge, that he’s delved into the burgeoning “home invasion” sub-genre, but fear not : as with all things Callaway (or maybe that should be Callaways, given that his wife, Amy, produces all these flicks — this being no exception), there’s a twist here to set it apart from its competitors/contemporaries. But it’s not one that I’m going to give away in case you decide to watch this movie, so rest easy on that score…

The recent release of Jigsaw proves, I guess, that the whole “torture porn” thing isn’t over with just yet, but earlier in 2017 low-budget writer/director Joshua Shreve beat the latest installment of the Saw franchise out of the gate with his straight-to-streaming (and, I guess, DVD, but for our purposes the fact that it’s available on Amazon Prime is all that really matters) effort Talon Falls — the question is, did he beat its at its own game?

There’s no question that this story about four road-tripping teens (played by Morgan Wiggins, Ryan Rudolph, Jordyn Rudolph, and Brad Bell) who make a pit-stop at a Kentucky roadside “scream park” featuring a plethora of blood, torture, and gore that all seems a little bit too realistic is, in fact, sadistic in the extreme — especially when the burly rednecks who run the joynt kidnap all our protagonists, one by one, and…