Here’s the thing : Jim Woodring’s been at it so long, and done it so well, that it’s almost easy to — dare I say it — take him for granted.

There’s really no reason that you (or I, or we) should, though — after all, the guy is basically a cartooning national treasure. Dating back to the (very) late-1980s debut of his first series, Jim, and continuing through Tantalizing Stories, Jim Vol. 2, Frank, and a number of subsequent graphic novels and occasional short strips set in his (and I use this term with precision) visionary world known as The Unifactor, he’s been making comics like no one else has ever made — hell, like no one else has probably ever thought of — for going on three decades now, and here’s another thing : his stuff seemed about 100 years ahead of anything that…

I’ll be the first to admit it : I’m way less familiar with the current state of affairs vis a vis all-ages comics than a person in my (self-appointed, but still) position probably should be. It’s not that I have anything against all-ages books, quite the contrary : I think there needs to be a whole heck of a lot more good stuff out there that appeals to the so-called “youth market” if we want kids to fall in love with the comics medium. If there’s no future for kids’ comics, there’s no future for comics, period, since very few people get interested in these funnybooks we love in their 20s and 30s. Comics started life aimed at a children’s audience, and even if they’ve purportedly “grown up” (notice I don’t say that they’ve actually matured), there always needs to be a healthy crop of material out there…

Still firmly in catch-up mode (but with light at the end of the tunnel), this week’s grab-bag of items that arrived in my mailbox includes three self-published comics from Kalen Knowles, one of the most distinctive voices in the Seattle underground, and another from Philly’s Pat Aulisio, who continues to blow me away with his idiosyncratic visions. Why waste time? Let’s have a look at the good stuff, and this time out it’s all good —

Knowles’ Journal is like nothing else I’ve ever seen in my life, a densely-packed sketchbook diary (think the Wimpy Kid books and you’re getting warm) told from the POV of a young octopoid alien named Atticus that is almost disarmingly clever and imbued with a genuine sense of charm and wonder throughout. Atticus’ world — hell, his entire space/time continuum — bears certain similarities to our own, but rather than employing these as set-pieces…

On the one hand, this is an extremely easy book to review — and on the other, it’s an extremely difficult one.

Chances are, you see, that most readers going into Spanish comics master Esteban Maroto’s IDW-published hardback Lovecraft : The Myth Of Cthulhu are going to be well familiar with the three H.P. Lovecraft adaptations collected herein — “The Nameless City,” “The Festival,” and “The Call Of Cthulhu” are, after all, the first three entries in the legendary “Cthulhu Cycle,” and have been translated into the comics medium a good number of times already (despite the rather curious claim made in Jose Villarrubia’s otherwise-fine introduction to this volume that Lovecraftian works are rarely adapted for comics) — and therefore what’s of primary interest here is not so much what’s being presented as how it’s being presented. The usual plot recaps and the like that accompany most self-respecting reviews are…

In recent years, micro-budget VOD steaming horror releases have become something of my stock-in-trade around these parts —  and yet, in recent months, as I’ve devoted most of my blogging time to getting a good backlog of material up on my Four Color Apocalypse comics review site, I’ve had disturbingly little time to not only write about, but to even watch them. Still, despite very little “wiggle room” in my schedule of late, once in awhile you just gotta scratch the “homemade horror” itch, and to that effect, last night I was browsing through the new additions on Amazon Prime, and settled on a very recent (as in, 2018) release from writer/director Art Arutyunyan entitled Armenian Haunting, purportedly focused on a family curse that dates back to the days of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks in the early 20th century.

This is a crucial, and…

When you’re talking about a book that runs to 366 pages and covers over 30 years, it’s difficult to know where to begin. Fortunately for me— and anyone else who reviews it — Canadian cartoonist Fiona Smyth arrived on the scene in the mid-1980s more or less “fully formed,” as the old expression goes, with a clear idea of both what she wanted to say and, crucially, how she wanted to say it, and has spent the succeeding decades refining and honing her style and messaging, but never veering too terribly far from the inherently feminist concerns that have been her stock in trade from the outset. And here’s the thing — her work isn’t merely “as relevant” as ever, it’s probably even moreso.

I first encountered Smyth, if memory serves me correctly, in the pages of her Vortex (remember them?) series Nocturnal Emissions (remember that?), and was immediately equal…

Let’s talk some mini comics! I’ve been getting a ton of them in the mail lately and am doing my best to keep up (if you’ve sent me some and haven’t seen ’em reviewed yet, rest assured, I’m getting around to everything in the next week or two — and if you haven’t sent me any but want to, get in touch!), so let’s dive right in and take a look at some of what’s been coming my way, starting with a trio from our old friend Brian Canini and his Drunken Cat Comics self-publishing imprint —

Roulette is a stark and unforgiving (just check out that cover) eight-pager about a couple “dudebros” who have hit rock bottom and are indulging in the preferred method of drunken Russians to end their suffering. What exactly brought the pair of them to this point is only hinted at, but it’s not like…

Let’s not mince words : Mark Fuhrman is an absolute bastard. Of all the figures of questionable repute to have risen to public prominence in the wake of the so-called “Trial Of The Century” — Chris Darden, Marcia Clark, etc. — Fuhrman is far and away the worst of the lot, a vicious and despicable racist SOB who has been granted a new, and entirely undeserved, lease on life (career-wise, mind you) as a true crime author and Fox “news” contributor (there’s a shock — not). I know the public has a notoriously short attention span, but the idea that this guy isn’t rotting away in obscurity in a cabin in Idaho — or, better yet, in a prison cell (he was, after all, the only person in the orbit of the O.J. Simpson case to have ever been convicted of anything in relation to it) is absurd at best…

The work of cartoonist Laura Lannes is as raw as it gets. Rendered in tightly-framed watercolors that leave plenty of negative space for readers to fill in the “blanks” (both physical and metaphorical) for themselves, her 2dcloud-published graphic memoir By Monday I’ll Be Floating In The Hudson With The Other Garbage is something a whole lot more than the “simple” 30-day collection (covering the period of February-March, 2017) of diary strips it appears to be on the surface : it’s an examination not only of an emotionally turbulent period in the life of a 25-year-old New Yorker, but of how the process of putting these experiences down on paper allows its author/subject to regain control over the narrative of her own life — at precisely the moment when the parameters of said life seem entirely out of her control.

If you’re gonna “play” the autobio “game” successfully, sharp observational skills…