Concluding our look at titles currently available from publisher Justin Skarhus’ Entropy Editions we come to catalogue number EE04, 65 Bugs, a formally conservative but conceptually innovative work from Providence’s Dean Sudarsky, who takes the format of the short-form newspaper strip and turns it on its ear by pairing visual simplicity with dense existential complexity to fashion an eight-page mini that exerts a strange hold on readers — or at least it did on this reader — long after the covers are closed. Sex, death, ennui, and the endless search to break free from life’s routines are all touched upon here — among other weighty concerns — but at the end of the day we’re still talking about a mini that is, perhaps against all odds, inherently fun, and if all of that sounds more than a bit contradictory on its face to you, well, that’s as I’m…

Continuing with out perusal of publisher Justin Skarhus’ Entropy Editions offerings, we come to catalogue number EE03, Los Angeles-based cartoonist Danielle Chenette’s The Beast, a deceptively “naive” comic that actually wryly and rather expertly deconstructs everything from the role of myth in society to “gun culture” to sibling dynamics to gaming to toxic masculinity — and somehow manages to do it all with a smile on its face and nary a hint of self-important lecturing. In fact, this unassuming little coming-of-age fable is actually, dare I say it, quite a bit of fun.

“Don’t go in the woods” is a common enough trope in popular culture — it’s even served as the title of at least two films that I’m aware of — but here Chenette cleverly and ingeniously transposes it into the internet age, where stories of things that go bump in the night have been amplified to…

Err — except for the talking (and endlessly taunting) stones, that is.

Case in point : the collector mentality, especially the comic book collector mentality. The kind of “thinking” that compels people to drop ridiculous sums of money for cheaply-made periodicals that are essentially disposable by design, and then to not even engage with them on the level people who paid a quarter (or less) for them did, which is to say — the collector doesn’t read that “holy grail” comic he (and yes, it’s almost always “he”) just dropped a huge chunk of his life savings and/or year’s…

I mean, for all intents and purposes what we have here is basically the comics equivalent of a PSA, and to top it all off, this thing isn’t even offered for sale anywhere! It is, however, easy enough to get your hands on a copy, as well you should — but we’ll get to all that at the end of this little write-up. First let’s deal with why I said you “should,” in fact, get it —

So-called “backward masking” is the theme of the day here, a largely bogus urban legend which contended that rock groups — in particular those that plied their wares in the heavy metal genre — were “concealing secret messages” in the vinyl grooves of their records that could only be heard…

Confession time : I pride myself on being up on just about everything going on in the world of small press and self-published comics, but try as I might, there is still a fair amount of stuff that escapes my notice until well after its release date, and such is the case with Scab County, a harrowing, disturbing, and yes even funny one-shot written and drawn by legendary DIY cartoonist/musician/SOV filmmaker Carlos Gonzales in 2015 and published by Floating World Comics the following year. Odds are fairly good, then, that a number of regular readers of this blog already have this book, but to give away the game right away here, let me say that for those of you who don’t, you’d be well-advised to do what I recently did and grab one up quickly because the sooner you get the contents of this comic into your subconscious mind…