It’s hot down south.

Hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, they tell me. Hot enough to melt the ice pack wrapped around little Jimmy Bob’s broken shoulder. Hot enough to send those armadillos scurrying across the blacktop really fast. Hot enough to make you do something crazy.

Veteran cartoonist Jeff Zenick, who’s made a habit of turning up in interesting places doing very interesting things when you least expect it, is probably the perfect person to capture the essence of what makes those run afoul of the law in Dixie do what they do simply because his astute observational skills not only capture every detail of a person’s face, but also what informs every line, every wrinkle, every cut, every bruise on it — in short, he draws real people that have been through some real shit. There is a tinge, I suppose, of the exotic…

I honestly feel halfway guilty about including a film shot only about a six-or seven-hour drive from my own house as part of my occasional “International Weirdness” series here on this site, but when you live in Minneapolis and the flick in question was made in Winnipeg, well — that’s how it goes, I guess. There isn’t much geographic distance between our towns, but there is that US/Canada border.

Winnipeg’s independent film scene has been fairly robust in recent years, as most know — comparisons to the 1990s “Toronto New Wave” have abounded — but our northern neighbors like their genre stuff, too, and 2015’s Dark Forest, brainchild of writer/director Roger Boyer, seeks to do something a little different with the classic “slasher” premise, namely : deconstruct it and turn it on its head at the same time. How best to do this? Well, how about by making it…

I guess I’ve been at this long enough to see when de facto themes generally, if inadvertently, present themselves within the “framework” of any given week’s releases, and when Image Comics has four horror books (all priced at $3.99 each, so keep that in mind as you evaluate whether or not these are worth the dent to your wallet) come out on the same Wednesday, well shit, it’s pretty obvious what we should be talking about, isn’t it? Doesn’t really take a “veteran” critic at all, as a matter of fact —

I had been cool to Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s Gideon Falls to this point — so much so that I had been intending, most likely, to drop it after the conclusion of its first “arc” — but with issue number four, now I’m no so sure. Lemire is (painfully) obviously going for some sort of low-rent Twin…

There’s no doubt about it : the post-apocalyptic world isn’t what it used to be. Somewhere, somehow, we swapped out The Road Warrior for The Road, and the whole idea of living in an irradiated wasteland, well — it started looking like a lot less fun.

Which, of course, is a change in favor of the decidedly more accurate — yet when the whole idea was fun, nobody had more fun with it than the Italians, who made a veritable industry out of cranking out low-budget  Mad Max knock-offs like Endgame, Warriors Of The Wasteland, or my personal favorite of the bunch, Exterminators Of The Year 3000.  Cartoonist Gipi has apparently chosen to ignore this, let’s face it, less-than-proud tradition of rip-roarin’ adventure set after world’s end laid down on celluloid by fellow countrymen Joe D’Amato, Enzo G. Castellari, Giuliano Carnimeo, and others, and instead is…

Somebody, please, tell me : where’s all the hate coming from?

Okay, maybe a better way to put that would be — why is all the hate coming in the first place because, strictly speaking, we know where it’s coming from : just as the gaming scene was disrupted mightily by right-wing trolls who didn’t want any women around and coalesced into a toxic stew known as “Gamergate,” and the comics scene has recently found itself fending off a broadly anti-diversity rump of retrograde fans who have taken to labeling their harassment and intimidation campaign “Comicsgate,” the Star Wars scene has been besieged by an as-yet-untitled, but damn noisy and annoying, group of right-wing ostensible “fans” who have decided that their (again, ostensibly) beloved franchise has been besieged by “political correctness,” and that the films are now loaded with so-called “SJW messaging.”

It’s all bullshit, of course : if anything…

If it seems like Image Comics is rolling out a new series (be it limited or ongoing) every week — well, that’s because they are. But even by their standards, four in one week is a lot —

Bloodstrike : Brutalists #0 is the one everyone’s been talking about (although that fact was apparently lost on my LCS owner, who ordered precisely one fucking copy — and it was the godawful Rob Liefeld variant, as opposed to the awesomeness shown above), as it brings the punk ‘zine/”alt” comics sensibilities of the great Michel Fiffe (most notably of Copra fame, although my favorite of his works is unquestionably Zegas) crashing headlong into the mercifully-shuttered world of the aforementioned Mr. Liefeld’s Extreme Studios line-up circa about — I dunno, 1996 or some shit. From the book’s numbering to its purposely-stilted dialogue to its admittedly lame core premise (undead heroes who bear…

We live not just in turbulent times, but significant ones — the ground has shifted beneath our feet, and if you’re American, it’s fair to say that, in many respects, the facade of the country we thought we knew has slipped, and in its place stands revealed a nation that we hoped (or, at the very least, liked to kid ourselves) we weren’t. This is, indeed, a defining moment in our history — but who defines what that moment is?

Nick Drnaso, hot on the heels of his striking 2015 debut graphic novel Beverly, is at least game to give cataloguing the contents of said moment a go in the just-released (by way, once again, of Drawn+Quarterly) Sabrina, and to call this merely a striking follow-up is to sell it well short indeed : this is a quantum leap forward that, fair enough, treads similar thematic ground to…

Chances are that it would be almost unbearably pretentious, not to mention way less clever than it sounds, if I were to refer to Alex Degen’s latest Koyama Press-published graphic novel, Soft X-Ray/Mindhunters  — which originally began “life” as a 44-page comic and now stands, expanded and extrapolated upon, at a whopping 392 pages — as “a visual feast – for the mind!” or somesuch, and yet —

Yeah, you guessed it. that’s definitely what it is. And I’m just as definitely kicking myself for not coming up with some genuinely unique, as opposed to glib, way to describe it — because “A.” (as the cover would have it) Degen’s cartooning is, in fact, consistently unique, and deserves same in return. Bursting at the seams with information, if not words (barring its gloriously, deliriously verbose chapter titles), there’s so much here to partake in, to parse, and to ponder over…

I think it’s fair to say that 2017 was a “break-out year” for New York-based cartoonist Katie Skelly, what with her OGN My Pretty Vampire ranking among the year’s best-reviewed books and proving to be an out-of-left-field success for its publisher, Fantagraphics, so it doesn’t come as any surprise that a follow-up would be rushed to presses fairly quickly — and it’s a doubly-obvious move since her “next book” was already, as the saying goes, “in the can.”

By way of making that statement seem far less mysterious, I suppose I should explain that the strips that make up Skelly’s forthcoming The Agency have already seen the light of day as webcomics, so collecting them all in one volume makes all kinds of sense given that she’s sure to have a solid group of freshly-minted fans who will be eager to see something new with her name on it on…

It’s no secret — nor should it be! — that Seattle cartoonist Sarah Romano Diehl’s Crust was one of my favorite comics of last year, but in my attempt to “play catch-up” with some of the stuff I’ve received in recent weeks/months, I came to the realization that I never got around to reviewing the other books (all, to her credit, self-published) that I got from Ms. Diehl some time back, so allow me to correct that egregious (nay, downright unforgivable!) error right now —

All The Comforts Of Being Alive is a thick, bursting-at-the-seams travelogue mini-comic/’zine that expertly incorporates mixed media such as photographs, scrap-paper notes, etc. to tell the story of Diehl’s first road trip back to her Colorado college town in a decade. There’s more than a whiff of nostalgia to the proceedings here, but it’s all good : anybody who goes back home (or, in this…