At first glance, UK cartoonist Lizz Lunney’s Big Bonerz, a 44-page collection of her black and white Street Dawgz strips collected between two riso-printed covers by J.T. Yost’s Birdcage Bottom Books, appears to be a sort of “edgy” or “confrontational” updating of the venerable “funny animal” genre, but the thing with preconceptions is — pun only slightly intended because, frankly, it’s not a very good one — well, they can be a real bitch.

And that goes double, as it turns out, when they’re right. This is, you see, a very funny comic — and it’s a crisp and incisive kind of funny, one that reflects real-world concerns and all-too-human foibles and frailties, even if it features a group of canine protagonists who are operating in “our” stead as they grapple with issues ranging from debilitating depression, class struggles, celebrity worship, and anger management to drug dependency, internet addiction…

It’s a veritable cavalcade of first issues this week, so let’s skip the stage-setting and get right down to the business of telling you which of these new series are worth your time (and, more importantly, money) to follow —

The major “event” book of the week is, of course, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen : The Tempest #1, which marks the beginning of the end not only for this two-plus-decade-old franchise, but for the legendary comics careers of the two creators behind it (although, at least in Moore’s case, we’ve heard that before). “Going out with a bang” seems to be the operative philosophy behind this six-parter, as well as settling every possible score on the way out the door, but this is, as you’d  no doubt expect, far more than simply a combination vanity project/victory lap — although elements of both are certainly…

There’s no doubt about it : “funny animal” comics aren’t what they used to be.

Then again, they never really were, at least not the good ones — one way or another, they were always at least a little bit subversive, and whether we’re talking about Walt Kelly’s open socio-political commentary in Pogo or Carl Barks’ knowing winks to the audience showing that he understood, accepted, and derived something very much like joy from working around, the limitations of form and function supposedly imposed upon his limitless imagination in his various “Duck Books,” our anthropomorphic stand-ins have always been one of the very finest means by which skilled and inventive artists communicate largely-unspoken truths about ourselves to ourselves.

In that sense, then, Philadelphia-based cartoonist August Lipp’s late-2017 Revival House Press release Roopert carries on an already-proud tradition — but this 56-page oversized magazine (a real bargain at ten bucks, trust me)…

Namelessness. Anonymity. Invisibility.

For the protagonist in Jerome Ruillier’s new Drawn+Quarterly-published graphic novel, The Strange, these three things are inextricably linked — and while all of them are, to one degree or another, imposed upon him by society and circumstance, the first two are undeniably de-humanizing (even if, fair enough, he’s a dog), while the third is key to, if not his freedom, at least his continued survival in the country he is attempting to scratch out a subsistence-level “living” in.

And sticking with the theme of anonymity, it permeates this book throughout : not only is its central character never saddled with a name, neither are the countries of his birth and residence. This could be happening anywhere. To any immigrant.

Ah, yes — immigration. As far as issues go, they don’t come much more timely and topical than that, do they? In the last few years, as…

Still reeling from the shock of losing Steve Ditko here, but nevertheless, the show must go on, even if it feels like it shouldn’t. Is there any time afforded us, in this modern world, to slow down, catch a breath, and take stock of where we are — not just individually, but as a people? Funny you should ask —

Tom Kaczynski has clearly been giving this very subject a great deal of thought, and in Cartoon Dialectics #3, the latest in an occasional series published by his own Uncivilized Books (pride of the Minneapolis indie cartooning scene, I assure you), he reflects on the siren-call power, and dangerous trappings, of nostalgia, and examines how yearning for an entirely mythologized past led us to where we are today — which means, of course, how it managed to get us stuck with Trump. Danish cartoonist Clara Jetsmark is his writing collaborator…

Okay, here’s the deal : I had this whole thing done — and probably done better — and I scrapped it. This now-meager memorial to the inimitable, irreplaceable Steve Ditko — artist, creator, visionary, iconoclast — initially had a soaring, elegiac title, was loaded with florid and heartfelt prose, and went into his work in excruciating, exacting detail.

It was a good piece. I liked it a lot. It took three-plus hours to whip it into shape. And then I shit-canned the whole thing and started over from scratch because I realized that’s not what Ditko would have wanted.

He was all about letting his work speak for itself, you see — that’s why he famously never gave interviews or appeared at conventions after 1968. That’s why he never wanted his photo taken. That’s why he headed for the exits at one publisher after another when he felt that…

Cartoonist E.A. Bethea has been doing what she does in the way that only she can do it for a couple of decades now, and her late-2017 Domino Books collection, Book Of Daze, is a publication that reflects the aesthetic values and ethos of the strips contained within it, to wit : it feels like a found object —specifically, one you might come across in a dusty corner of an abandoned house, or on the table of a waterfront dive bar, complete with dried beer bottle “rings” caked into the cover. How it got there, who was reading it — these are questions no one can answer. Rather like the nature of life itself.

Bethea’s  drawing style is minimalist to the point of looking and feeling rushed, with key figures (up to and including the protagonists of most strips) frequently omitted from view in favor of presenting things from…

Four series I’ve been following from their inception  — in the case of two that means for a couple/few years now, for the other two just a handful of months — wrapped up this past week. But did they wrap up succesfully? That is the question —

Okay, it’s probably a cheat to include The Beef #5 in this column given it hit shelves the Wednesday before last, but my shop didn’t get their copies until this week, so it counts as a “new comic” as far as I’m concerned — and it’s an awesome one, at that. Things don’t go so well for our guy Chuck — in fact, hopefully it’s not giving too much away to call him “Ground Chuck” at this point — but that doesn’t mean his alter ego doesn’t live on. This issue was grotesque and unnerving even by this series’ standards, but it…