More often than not, a fifth Wednesday in any given month means a “slow week” for comic book readers. Not so this time around, though, so let’s take a look and see what the LCS and the US Mail had in store for yours truly —

Spain Volume 1 : Street Fighting Men is the first in a multi-volume retrospective from Fantagraphics of the career of legendary, trailblazing underground master (and Zap Comix co-founder) Spain Rodriguez. His famous allegorical “stand-in” character Trashman takes center stage (and rightly so) in this book, and you already know all these strips (presented here in their entirety) are beyond fucking awesome, but also worthy of note here is the inclusion of “Manning,” a superb 1969 story about police corruption that originally ran in The East Village Other, as is the richly-detailed text history of the artist’s life and times authored by underground scholar 

Not to sound too grandiose right off the bat, but Tim Lane is more than just a cartoonist, he’s a medium — his mind, his pencils, and his brushes channeling a message from the past, yet one that’s somehow timeless, of an America that maybe never really was, but is no less “real” for the fact that it only “exists” in the same “place” that conjured it forth : the morass of our collective national subconscious.

To be sure, what Lane calls “The Great American Mythological Drama” is peppered with genuine personages, places, and events, many of which he relates with as much historical accuracy as is possible, but the way in which he weaves them together into something like a seamless tapestry is the stuff of pure legend — a legend he’s been constructing in his sporadically self-published comics series, Happy Hour In America, since 2003, as…

You’ve heard the scuttlebutt by now, of course — Justice League is a mess; Henry Cavill’s face looks ridiculous thanks to the shooting-schedule-necessitated decision to “erase” his mustache by means of CGI; the 9th-inning additional re-shoots are easy to spot; the so-called “DCEU” is doomed thanks to this film’s poor box office performance.

Some of these points are legit (the flick is certainly uneven, tonally and structurally, Cavill’s MIA ‘stache is conspicuous in its absence, the re-shoots (and brighter, “happier” color grading) undertaken by “relief” director Joss Whedon don’t fit in with Zack Snyder’s material), while others are clearly over-stated (the sub-$100 million opening weekend has been largely off-set by a stronger than expected “hold” over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday period), but at the end of the day, even after filtering out the noise (much of it generated by a certain competing comic-book-publisher-turned-movie-studio), the simple fact remains — this is…

To the extent that Filipino cartoonist November Garcia is a “known quantity” in  American small-press comics, it’s for her Hic And Hoc-published book Foggy Notions from a couple of years back, but now that John Porcellino is stocking the first two issues of her self-published autobio series Malarkey at Spit And A Half, I’m sincerely hoping that a lot more attention is in store for her. 2017 was a breakthrough year for the likes of Emil Ferris, Ben Passmore, Eric Kostiuk Williams, Katie Skelly, and other formerly-emerging talents — if I had to place a wager on the first person to “break through” in 2018, it could very well be Garcia.

I confess to not being terribly “plugged in” to the contemporary cartooning scene in the Philippines, but I know that the country’s rich tradition of woodcut art heavily informed the work of such “Big Two” luminaries as Alfredo Alcala…

I survived the abomination that was Doomsday Clock #1 by the slimmest of margins, and with that in the rear view mirror, it’s time to take a look at stuff that arrived at my LCS or via the USPS this week that I actually liked —

The fifth and latest self-published issue of Alex Graham’s magazine-sized solo series Cosmic BE-ING (yes, that’s how you spell it), originally solicited for Winter 2016, is finally here, and to say that this guy is one of the most intriguing cartoonists in the small press scene these days is an understatement of quasi-criminal proportions. Graham’s juxtaposition of the otherworldly and the mundane is meticulously delineated by means of painfully intricate “head-trip” designs and a keen eye for everyday observation. No one else is even trying to do the sort of comics Graham does; he truly exists in a sub-genre unto himself. This time out…

And so here we are — the “big event” that all of DC Rebirth has been leading up to, Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s eagerly anticipated/thoroughly dreaded (depending on your point of view) DCU/Watchmen mash-up, Doomsday Clock. The lines between the two formerly-separate fictitious universes were blurred, of course, in last year’s DC Universe Rebirth Special, and here they’re completely wiped out. We’ve known it was coming, now it’s arrived — and it wants five bucks a month from you for the next year as it plays out over the course of 12 issues. Should you do what it (and, specifically, DC) wants?

Lots of critics are answering that question with an emphatic “yes,” some no doubt charmed by the free pancake mix and maple syrup that preview copies of the book came packaged with (DC shrewdly, but wisely, calculating that many comics critics — like many…

Next week DC promises to “change everything we thought we knew about the universe” or somesuch bullshit with their wretchedly insulting Doomsday Clock cash-grab, so before that hits let’s take a look at what the final week of the world as we used to know it had to offer, shall we? Time for another dive into what LCS and the US Postal Service brought my way —

I’ve never been able to get a firm handle on Tim Seeley, finding his stuff to be wildly up and down (often within the same series — I’m looking at you Revival), but when he’s on, he’s on. Before it had a premature and all-too-convenient “ending” forced on it, Effigy was shaping up into something flat-out amazing, and given that some of the same themes of media obsession and instant celebrity seemed to be at the heart of Brilliant Trash, the…

Aaron Lange has issues — five of ’em, literally, as regards his annually-issued comics anthology series Trim — and too many to count, in the figurative sense, as is plainly evident in Trim‘s pages. Consider : this is a guy who, according to a TCJ piece from a few years back, relocated to Philadelphia because his previous hometown, Cleveland, wasn’t a big enough shithole.

I’ve only spent a mercifully short amount of time in both cities and I have to say that at least Lange got that much right : Cleveland, after all, has every bit the air of a town whose best days are behind it as its (numerous) critics charge, while Philly very much feels like a place that never had any “best days,” and almost certainly never will.

Living in environs such as these is bound to inculcate a certain type of attitude among those…