No matter how you look at it, you don’t know how to look at Max Huffman — nor what to expect from him. Which means, of course, that he’s unquestionably one of the most interesting and surprising of the true auteurs working in comics today — but even with that in mind, his latest self-published mini, Whisnant #1, is something well and truly out of left field.

As deliberately and overtly “cartoony” as anything Huffman has done, this thing reminded me more than a bit of Bud Blake’s old syndicated strip Tiger on the margins — only it’s actually, ya know, good, and has something to say about actual existential concerns. I think, at any rate.

So, what have we got here? Cubism, a black-and-white protagonist in a full-color world who inexplicably becomes full-color himself, an ice cream truck that sells gems and crystals, “people” that aren’t people, family…

I find it downright fascinating that Tana Oshima has gone back to press with her first self-published mini, Pulp Friction, not only because I’d never had the pleasure of reading it before, but because it frankly takes a certain amount of guts for an artist in any medium to draw attention to their “warts and all” earlier work at a point in their career ouevre when they’re in a really confident creative groove — and, as regular readers here already know, I think Oshima’s been in the midst of a very solid groove for some time now.  Which isn’t my roundabout way of saying that this debut effort is necessarily lacking, mind you — in fact, the “lower dose” of refinement with which she tackles subjects that are still very much at the heart of her ongoing artistic project lends this comic an extra degree of immediacy which…

Remember when comics were kinda nuts?

Okay, fair enough, plenty of them still are, but too many are self-consciously nuts, and if there’s one thing we could all do with a bit more of in these trying and uncertain times, it’s comics that are naturally nuts in the truest, and most unforced fashion. Comics that are nuts because they don’t know how to be anything else — and because there’s no real reason for them to be anything else. Meet Desmond Reed’s The Funnies.

Revolving around a quintet of spaghetti-limbed characters named Ralph Jonathan, Wallace T.J., Henrietta Susan, Gil Christopher, and Mona Gertrude, the vignettes in Reed’s magazine-sized comic are simple, straightforward and, yes, funny, whether they tell “stories” per se or simply function as jokes in and of themselves, and while there’s a stylistic through-line to all of Reed’s art — one that, in fairness, borrows elements…

Her name may be better known in the punk and DIY ‘zine scenes than it is among the comics community writ large, but Janelle Hessig has been at it for a long time. A foundational figure in the 1990s East Bay DIY movement, Hessig’s seminal Tales Of Blarg was more than a product of its times, it’s proven to be downright timeless, and in recent years she’s introduced the broader public to the talents of Liz Suburbia, among others, via her Gimme Action publishing imprint — which has also been home to some of her own cartooning.  In other words, she’s been around — but her work never gets old.

As evidence for this assertion I offer Big Punk, her latest uniquely-formatted (it’s more, shall we say, horizontally-oriented than you’d typically expect) ‘zine that comes our way courtesy of Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club, a publisher that’s helped…

Do your cats hate plants? Ours certainly do, to the point that we can’t keep them any more — plants, that is. As if you were even wondering. But the feline protagonist of cartoonist Lauren Barnett’s 2019 Tinto Press-published Bernadette takes plant hatred to a whole new level.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that this probably sounds like a threadbare premise to carry over the course of 42 pages, but it’s not like Bernadette just sits around stewing about her owner’s new houseplant the whole way through. Like any cat, she also likes to eat, sleep, jump around a bit, and — well, that’s about it. So, is all of that, then, enough to fill out 42 pages? I guess that’s the real question.

In the hands of most artists, the answer to that would, of course, be a pretty unequivocal “no,” but Barnett is a special…

I like to think that I’ve reviewed some pretty interesting and unusual things in my time, but this one may just take the cake — not because cartoonist Kriota Willberg’s latest self-published mini (it came out in late 2019), Cat Friends, Bird Acquaintances, And Their Human Furniture is necessarily challenging either conceptually or technically, but because it’s well and truly one of those things that you sort of have to see to believe that it even exists, since at first glance one could be forgiven for assuming that any sort of readership for it, well, doesn’t.

Not that “readership” is the right word here exactly, given this is a small — and silent — “suite” of thematically-linked anatomical illustrations with a twist, but honestly, that’s neither here nor there. The main point I’m at least attempting to get at here is that the existence of a publication this specialized, this…