Is it that time of year again? Why yes, indeed, it is that time of year again — specifically, the end of the year, and with it my end-of-year “Top 10” lists. As usual, things are divvied up into six categories : Top 10 Single Issues (stand-alone comics or comics that are part of an ongoing series that saw only one issue published this year), Top 10 Ongoing Series (serialized comics that saw two or more issues published in the past year), Top 10 Special Mentions (“comics-adjacent” projects such as ‘zines, books on comics history, art books or sketchbooks, or books that utilize words and pictures but don’t adhere to traditional rules of sequential storytelling), Top 10 Vintage Collections (books that reprint work originally published prior to the year 2000), Top 10 Contemporary Collections (books that reprint work originally published, physically or digitally, after the year 2000 and going right…

Oozing forth from the irradiated slime with a wave and a smile, Toronto cartoonist Robb Mirsky’s latest creation is equal parts Casper The Friendly Ghost and The Toxic Avenger, and in the self-published pages of the new mini Sludgy we meet him/it/them in all his/its/their gooey glory, the character’s very existence (on paper, that is) offering a disconcertingly chipper commentary on environmental destruction and the lifelong quest for acceptance on the part of the outcast or those “othered.” Plus, of course, some laughs. Who couldn’t use a few of those?

At heart, Mirsky is a humorist, and his classically-influenced — to say nothing of fundamentally strong and aesthetically professional — cartooning represents a kind of casual apex of thematically-apropos illustration, first setting the proper tone and then carrying it all the way through to the end. He touches on some fairly serious subjects, sure — in fact, his very…

After cutting his teeth on a number of impressive self-published minis in recent years, it was only a matter of time until Thomas Lampion made his full-length graphic novel debut, and with the recent Birdcage Bottom Books publication of The Burning Hotels, that moment has arrived — or maybe it was already here? I mean, yeah, we know that “time is a flat circle” and all that, but even still — synchronicities and repeating patterns throughout history usually don’t figure as prominently as they do here in comics unless they’re written by a certain bearded fellow named Moore.

Yes, this books is a memoir, but it’s a highly inventive memoir, Lynchian in both its structure and imagery, firmly grounded (both in the past and the present) yet nevertheless hallucinatory and even a touch phantasmagoric. It’s unique, that’s for sure — and effectively so, at that. It’s also strangely affecting…

Heralding itself as the first chapter in a multi-part saga, Steve Lafler’s slender new book 1956 : Sweet Sweet Little Ramona — self-published under the cartoonist’s own venerable Cat-Head Comics imprint — is, at first glance, the retail world’s answer to Mad Men (and I say that fairly confidently in spite of being someone who’s never seen probably more than a few minutes of Mad Men — and in passing, at that), but if there’s one thing Lafler’s proven over his long career, it’s that he knows how to subvert expectations even while working within fairly well-defined genre confines. Sure, this being but an opening salvo and all it’s impossible to say whether the same will prove to be true here in the long run, but in the early going? All signs sure seem to point in that direction.

So, yeah, it’s 1956, and a gaggle of department store buyers…

I guess maybe it’s a bit grandiose to call Birdcage Bottom’s release of the fifth and final issue of November Garcia’s Malarkey the end of an era, but fuck it : for the past five years this book has been a staple of my comics-reading life, and I have something of a personal “trajectory” with the title, as well, going from enthusiastic fan to gushing critic to friend of the cartoonist to someone’s who’s consistently thanked in the book’s credits and whose “pill quotes” are regularly featured on its back covers and related promotional internet blurbs. I ain’t no neutral observer or anything of the sort — not that critics ever are, it rather flies in the face of the job description. Still, it’s fair to say that I have a personal interest in Malarkey‘s success, there’s no doubt about it — this comic really is my equivalent…

The 1970s were known as the “Me Decade,” but if there’s one thing that the rise of social media has made abundantly clear, it’s that vainglorious self-centeredness didn’t end on December 31st, 1979 — it was just getting started. You’ve got people posting and tweeting about everything from their political opinions to what they cooked for dinner, and everything in between, and quite often filming whatever they’re doing just to prove they’re doing it. If you want the dull minutiae of your life out there for all to see, there’s nothing but your own good sense to stop you from putting it out there — and common sense seems to be as short in supply as egocentrism is abundant. And so here we are, in a world where the once-unthinkable reigns supreme — why, even no-count government office employees who can’t draw seem to think, for some reason, that people…