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…

I was warned, by no less an authority on all things small press-related than Daniel Elkin, that once I read the first issue of Tongues, the opening installment in a new, long-form, modern retelling of the Promethean myth by Anders Nilsen (take or leave the Brekhus as you see fit — although the artist himself seems to be including it more and more frequently), that I’d probably feel like going back and re-doing my “Top 10 Single Issues Of 2017” list — and damn if he wasn’t right. Still, going back over old ground has never been my style, we just plug ahead around these parts, but that doesn’t mean we can’t — and shouldn’t — give this extraordinary work the recognition it deserves, does it?

There’s lots to unpack when one discusses Tongues — visually, conceptually, thematically — but before getting lost in those tantalizing weeds, a word…

How’s everyone’s holiday season going? Is your schedule brimming over with last-minute shit to get done? Or do you actually have time to do some reading? If so, here’s some new stuff you can find at your local comic shop, or via mail order, all of which (for better, worse, or somewhere in between) drew my attention over the course of the past week —

Assassinistas #1 is the opening salvo of a new six-parter from Shelly Bond’s Black Crown imprint at IDW. Writer Tini Howard’s name is one I confess to being unfamiliar with previously, but a quick glance at her CV shows that  she’s most recently worked on a couple of re-launches for decidedly second-tier Image properties Hack/Slash and The Magdalena — and now she’s jumped right to the head of the class by landing a gig co-creating a series with Gilbert Hernandez. This old/new mix seems to be something…

I plead the Fifth on whether or not I’ve ever done this myself, but there was a time when dropping acid and reading (or, more likely, just looking at) Jack Kirby comics was a popular pastime — and so it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before some enterprising cartoonist came along, eliminated the drug-dealing middleman, and just served up Kirby-esque tales with the “LSD effect” baked right into the pages.

Enter Kansas City’s William Cardini — although I honestly wonder whether or not he hails from a dimension much like the ones he draws, because I don’t know how you come up with some of this stuff without having seen it, perhaps even lived it, firsthand. Or, ya know, maybe he’s just got a good connection for hallucinogenics, in which case I really need him to give me a call.

My only previous exposure to…

And so we’ve arrived at this, our final — and, I’m sure for some, most significant — “best of” list of the year, surveying 2017’s top 10 graphic novels. Quick reminder of our “house rules” : these have to be original works designed from the outset for the GN format, not collected works of any sort, which have already been covered on our contemporary and vintage collected editions lists — and, as always, no real “reviews” here (chances are I’ve reviewed most, if not all, of these somewhere or other online already), just quick summaries of why they’re all so fucking awesome. Okay, let’s do this!

10. Vague Tales by Eric Haven (Fantagraphics) – Long one of the most intriguing, if sporadic, cartoonists around, here Haven constructs a fascinating and surreal overarching story from mostly-silent vignettes featuring barbarians, super-heroes, sexy sorceresses, and monsters that borrow equally from Jack Kirby, Fletcher…