Dare I say there’s something refreshing about reading a ‘zine full of pre-pandemic diary comics, heartless as that no doubt may sound?

Certainly, at this point it’s safe to state that we’ve all been affected by COVID-19 to one degree or another, and many a reader of this review will likely have lost a friend or relative to the disease, so perhaps it’s inherently self-indulgent to yearn for a simpler time, and yet — even the simpler times were often not that simple, and if there’s one thing that Thomas Lampion’s 2019 self-published diary comics mini This Wasn’t What I Had In Mind reminds us of, it’s that the “good old days” had their problems and challenges, as well.

One of them, however, was most assuredly not a world under medically-necessitated lockdown, and as a result the various personal challenges he’s struggling with in and around April of 2019, which…

I live by a simple motto around these parts : if it defies classification, description, and rational analysis, then it’s something I want to see. Other critics can give you the lowdown on stuff that can be categorized, labeled, genre-boxed, and otherwise defined — and hey, I do a fair amount of that myself — but when it comes to the stuff that starts somewhere beyond the point where the ability to articulate a traditional critique of it stops, well, that’s the kind of work that’s always going to catch my eye and always going to be something I want to talk about, if only because the very act of talking about it is such a tricky proposition.

Comics is an art form that I feel lends itself rather well to such efforts, simply because the fourth-dimensional construct of time can be fucked with, or even dispensed with altogether…

The second of Mike Shea-Wright’s new self-published minis dedicated to celebrating pre-COVID social get-togethers that would now properly be classified as “super-spreader” events, Beach, represents perhaps a greater flight of fancy than its de facto “twin” release, Venue, in that the events depicted in that comic could — indeed, often do — happen pretty much as depicted, while the events depicted in this one really aren’t likely to at all, but hey, what do I know? Maybe Shea-Wright just frequents far more interesting beaches than I do — and maybe you do, as well.

In short, this is a wordless story about an afternoon at a beach that becomes one big naked party and, as such, the goals of the author are perhaps a bit broader here than simply showing the purported “joys” of a large gathering of people : indeed, the “all bodies are beautiful” and “de-stigmatize…

Chances are that you’re as tired of being cooped up as I am, but I’ll say this much : one of the “net pluses” of the pandemic (sorry, there really has to be a better way of phrasing that, but I’ll be damned if I can think of what that would be right now) has been a creativity and productivity boom among self-publishing and otherwise-independent cartoonists. Most of us are well-familiar with the justly-lauded strips being shared daily on instagram by Alex Graham, Simon Hanselmann, and others, but it’s not like the printed page has been abandoned completely in this “brave” new world, either (indeed, Graham has just collected her Dog Biscuits series in a massive 400-plus-page volume she’s selling through Lulu and the entirety of Hanselmann’s “Crisis Zone” will be released in a single volume in fairly short order from Fantagraphics) — which brings us to Mike Shea-Wright and…

Occasionally I’ll get a comic submitted for review that’s a couple years old but still in need of more publicity than it’s received to date, and such is the case with John Carvajal’s self-published mini Dust, a precisely-crafted and insightful little number that, for whatever reason, appears to have flown beneath almost everybody’s radar. Yeah, I know, the small-press landscape is a crowded one, but trust me when I say : Carvajal’s work pretty much always stands out from the crowd, and this is no exception.

There are some sci-fi tropes and trappings on offer here — robots, for example, seem to be a ubiquitous feature in folks’ homes — but at its core this is a story about coping with loss and grieving, about how we channel our energy into strange and bizarre outlets as a form of release, only to have said outlets become obsessions — the…

I’ve long been of the opinion that single-creator anthologies are something that’s in far too short a supply these days, but I’m pleased as can be to see Ryan Alves has thrown his hat into the ring with Bubblegum Maelstrom #1 from Awe Comics, a solid collection of six short strips, most boasting full painted color, that pleasingly concludes on a “Continued Next Issue” note. Which means, of course, that this is a good enough comic that you’ll be hankering for more.

Still, it’s bad form in the extreme to begin at the end, so let’s back up a bit here : it starts as life itself does, with fucking, and continues apace through a particularly grotesque birth, followed by an equally grotesque bio-dystopia, then on into a Bat-spoof, and from there makes its way through mutant plant growth, just plain mutants doing battle across a canyon, and fire-farting birds…

You know the old saying — “change is the only constant.” Yet most changes are slow and inexorable things that occur over protracted periods of time, barely visible at all from moment to moment. You likely don’t notice if you put on ten pounds over the course of a couple of months, for instance, but a friend who sees you at the beginning of those couple of months and again at the end will likely be biting their tongue to prevent themselves from saying “hey, looks like you’ve gained a little weight” — unless you’ve got friends like mine, that is.

One of the nice things about cartooning, though, is that it can be used to fuck with time, even absent the stereotypical “Later—” caption box. Events that occur over the course of a few panels can translate to mere moments of “real time,” or to several months. The clock…