August Lipp is a cartoonist with a singular worldview that’s equal parts charming and disturbing, and he’s unafraid to blend the two in unique ways that leave you feeling decidedly amused, decidedly uneasy, and, frequently, wonderfully perplexed. When he firmly stakes out a distinct point of view and tone he’s capable of “hitting it out of the park” like nobody’s business — Roopert stands as one of the finest comics of the past decade — but hey, every artist has a process they need to work through before arriving at wherever it is they’re going, and that’s what his recently self-published New Leash On Life is all about.

The funny thing, though, is that for what’s billed as a collection of notebook drawings spanning the 2019-2020 period, these are, by and large, remarkably finished works — Lipp puts more “sweat equity” into many ostensibly “throwaway” illustrations than some cartoonists do…

When the fist page of your new mini pretty much sums up everything that everybody who’s been making so-called “quarantine comics” over the past year has been trying to say, then I’m going to credit you with doing two things remarkably well : cutting to the chase, and clearing the decks to facilitate moving on to something (please, God, anything!) else. Not that the pandemic doesn’t hang over the rest of November Garcia’s latest Birdcage Bottom-published ‘zine, (Even) More Diary Comics From A Relative Nobody #2, as surely as it hangs, Sword of Damocles-style, over all of our lives, but let’s not forget — there’s other shit going on, too. And some of that shit is even important.

Admittedly, as the title of this review gives away plainly, this is is a short little comic (it was created as a Kickstarter premium for the latest — and final…

There’s a dreamlike quality to Lauren Hinds’ new release from Paper Rocket Mini Comics, Jeremy, that’s so undeniable that I honestly spent most of my first read-through of the book thinking that the boy the title refers to was an imaginary friend of our unnamed protagonist, who we’ll just call The Kid ( with apologies to Prince). The Kid narrates/relates the entire saga of their friendship from his own first-person POV, and he and Jeremy get up to all kinds of secretive shit (mostly revolving around stealing plums, sneaking off into the forest, or sneaking off into the forest in order to steal plums), so hey — even though Jeremy is talked about by The Kid’s parents, and other adults, and even though he interacts with other school kids (often to his detriment), I really thought we were going to find, in the end, that he was just a…

Okay, fair enough, in purely chronological terms it may have only encompassed a handful of days, and in purely geographic terms it may have only taken us from Baltimore to Milwaukee and back again, but it certainly feels like we’ve been on quite a journey with the nerd/outcast clique at the heart of Colin Lidston’s sublime The Age Of Elves series from Paper Rocket Mini Comics, and in purely emotional terms it’s fair to say that we have — and so it’s only fitting, as this remarkably heartfelt, but decidedly unvarnished, look at the lives of high school “geeks” comes to a close, that the focus is squarely on Sara, the most fleshed-out character of the group and our “entry point” as readers from word go. Yes, this is an ensemble-cast story after a fashion, but it’s really been her story all along, and as such hers is the only…

Projects that have complex and circuitous gestation processes and then emerge fully-formed into the world as something entirely other than that which they were originally intended to be are, as you’d expect, a hit-or-miss proposition, but when they hit sometimes they really hit : David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, for instance, famously began on paper as a TV pitch centered around Sherilyn Fenn’s Audrey Horne character from Twin Peaks ditching the Pacific Northwest for the bright lights of Hollywood, while Jack Kirby’s amazingly prescient OMAC evolved from a scuttled re-boot of Captain America that was to be set in the far future. The lesson here being, I suppose, to never let a “course correction” — or even several of them — get you down. If your central conceit is strong enough, it’ll be able to survive many twists and turns before taking its final shape.

Now, we can add to…

“Just let it go” is easy enough advice to give to anyone who is, as the popular vernacular would have it, going through some shit, but it’s considerably more difficult to follow. And when tragedy has befallen a person, deciding what to let go of becomes all the more impossible to figure out. I have, for instance, known people who got rid of all of any and reminders of an ex after a breakup, only to wish they had something — anything — of theirs back later, while on the other side of the coin, I’ve known people who have lost a loved one who simply can’t bear to part with a single reminder of them, no matter how inconsequential or trivial some of the crap they left behind may seem to the outside observer.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is, when it comes to traumatic…

Right off the bat, this ‘zine is wrapped in a pretty thick layer of mystery, beginning with : what, exactly, is its title? Is it called Rasberry Blue? Is it called Rasberry Blue Untitled, given the latter word appears at the bottom of the cover? Or is it, perhaps, Rasberry Blue/Untitled, meaning that it likely contains two stories/strips? It’s a head-scratcher, to be sure, but in the end I settled on the full name cartoonist Joey Tepedino gives it on the insider front cover, The Kingdom Of Rasberry Blue Untitled, since you really can’t lose by picking out the longest of several title “options” on offer. But, really, that’s just the beginning as far as the question marks go.

The year it came out, for instance, is nowhere to be found within — nor is any copyright information whatsoever, And a stickler for grammar such as…