It’s a pretty cool thing, when you think about it : making comics like nobody else is making. And it’s especially cool to do it within a framework that’s about as tried and true as it gets.

All of which is me letting you know that the (extremely) short-form stories presented in Johan Broadley’s 2016 Le Dernier Cri book, Wild For Adventure, are both deliciously weird — and strangely mundane. We know this world he portrays — we’ve just never had it shown to us like this before. So yes, at first glance these are every bit the vaguely traditional gag strips they appear to be — until they’re not. And there’s always one or two off-kilter things in each that are guaranteed to shake your perceptions just a bit. I’m reminded, crazy as this may sound, of the so-called “creepy crawls” the Manson family used to engage in…

Aside from Gary Panter, no artist from the first wave of Raw has been more influential to the generations that came in his wake that Mark Beyer — and, like Panter, he’s never been content to simply rest on his laurels and let his reputation (to say nothing of his back catalogue) do the talking for him. Indeed, although he’s mainly moved into the world of “fine” art that he had one foot in from the outset, his work continues to both challenge and transfix, ever in pursuit of new statements to make and ideas to explore within a stylistic framework that’s immediately recognizable as his own and no one else’s.

Which brings us to the latest Beyer item to make its way into my hands, the Le Dernier Cri-published Mark Beyer : Sketchbook 2016-17, which eschews pretty much anything by way of titles or branding and just plunges…

Let’s be honest : at this point a person could commit an entire blog to reviewing nothing but quarantine-centric diary comics, simply because so many cartoonists are filling their own blogs with quarantine-centric diary comics themselves. Which is, of course, to be expected given present(-ish) circumstances — but it also means that it’s getting more and more difficult for any particular cartoonist’s quarantine work to stand out from the pack, simply because there’s a real glut of this kind of stuff out there.

Fellow Twin Cities resident Lance Ward needn’t worry, however — autobio has always been his “jam,” as the young folks said a few years back (when they were even younger — but then, so were all of us), and diary comics are often just short-form autobio strips in and of themselves. What makes his new collection of them, A Good Man’s Brother, a bit different than…

Culled from the pages of Providence’s legendary Paper Rodeo from 1995-2001, Fort Thunder alumnus Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce Shit is every bit the collection of curiosities one would expect, given that it’s an “odds and ends” compendium on its face — but who are we kidding here? The words “expect” and “Brinkman” don’t really belong in the same zip code together, much less the same sentence.

Italy’s Hollow Press — who recently issued a handsome, oversized hardcover collection of Brinkman’s Multiforce strips — were wise to go the completist route by assembling all this sidebar “shit” into this top-notch mini with production values to match the quality of its contents (archival quality cream-colored paper, heavy-duty cardstock covers with bronze-embossed exteriors covers and silver-embossed interiors), but this is no mere historical curiosity or relic of days gone by. That would be cool, but hardly essential, and I would submit that any assemblage…

Work is a death trap, and we all know it. If your job doesn’t kill you directly, it’ll likely kill you indirectly — either by means of stress-related conditions such as ulcers, repeated-motion fatigue and attendant joint decomposition/arthritis, heart disease, various work-induced cancers or, in a pinch, maybe you’ll get yourself killed in a car accident going to work, from work, or to or from some other place, such as a bar, hoping to forget about work for a little while. However you slice it, the minute you start punching a time clock, that clock is ticking against you.

In some cases, however, the connection between employment and death is a pretty straight line — like, what if your workplace literally sits atop a portal to hell? Which brings us to the first self-published mini (that I’m aware of, at any rate) from Michigan-based cartoonist Chris Russ, Eddie The…