With his long-awaited Constitution Illustrated  having just been released by Drawn+Quarterly (which I would expect you’ll be able to see a critique of here on this site in the near future, given that I already reviewed the “preview” Constitution Illustrated Sampler mini), you’d think cartoonist R. Sikoryak would be busy enough, but apparently not — and hey, who doesn’t have a few spare minutes to trash our repugnant and incompetent current president, anyway? Here’s the rub, though — are you really “trashing” old, fat, syphilitic, orange, impotent, misogynist, and bigoted if you’re just quoting his own words?

Like his large-format (and also D+Q-published) The Unquotable Trump, Sikoryak isn’t “making anything up” but the illustrations in his new follow-up mini The Impeachable Trump, which he self-published in the “early days” of this pathetically mismanaged coronavirus pandemic. As the cover itself states, these are more of Donnie Dumbshit’s “best…

Hearkening back to the underground science fiction epics of everyone from George Metzger to Matt Howarth, to the more contemporary efforts of ambitious cartoonists like Joshua Cotter, Josh Frankel’s new self-published comics ‘zine (and that’s the right word — this is a magazine-sized publication that clocks in at 40 pages) Eccentric Orbits is nevertheless something new, different, and frankly pretty unique : a human-sized and often quite light-hearted and, dare I say it, fun take on tried and true genre tropes that draws you in immediately with the superb quality of its illustration and keeps your interest by dint of its strong characterization. Not that the art doesn’t stay great from start to finish, too, mind you, because it most assuredly does.

Frankel’s teenage protagonists, part of the crew of the ingeniously-named space station Indiscretion, are both entirely typical of kids their age and fully-fleshed-out individuals, and whether they’re being…

It’s always a tricky proposition to know what to say about Jim Woodring’s work simply because the depth and scope of his creative vision is both deeper and wider than the ability of mere language — even superlative-laden language — to keep up with. Which, yeah, is a roundabout way of saying that so much has been said about him already that there’s now much new to say — but then he comes out with a new book, and you figure that it would be a shame to ignore it just because you’re bound to say “it’s great, you should buy it.” So we’ll get that part out of the way first and see where things take us.

To that end, then : Woodring’s got a new book out from Fantagraphics, a handsome  hardcover segmented into color-coded and thematically-linked pseudo-chapters called And Now, Sir – Is THIS Your Missing Gonad?

If you read my review of Jeremy Rogers and C.J. Patterson’s Mondo Groovy issue one, you’ll recall that one of the things I appreciated most about that admittedly trashy — hell, deliberately trashy — comic was that it was totally un-pretentious and utterly lacking in both self-awareness, and awareness of the broader comics “scene” in general. And all of that goes double for its companion book, Mondo Groovy Horrorshow #1. And you kind of can’t help but tend to love this one, too.

Look, let’s be honest — normally a cartoonist has to be a fairly “known quantity” before they decide to try to monetize the contents of their old sketchbooks, but here’s Rogers, a fairly “unknown quantity” if ever there was one, doing it right the fuck now, before anybody has much of a clue who he is. Not because he seems particularly arrogant, mind you. Not because his…

So, yeah, my first thought when I got Mondo Groovy issue one — along with its companion comic, Mondo Groovy Horrorshow #1 — in the mail from cartoonist Jeremy Rogers was “these guys are trying too hard.” I mean, that title alone is just way too spot-on, right? You know this is probably going to be about a couple pothead dudes who are into trash cinema and don’t have much else going on. Maybe with a Fat Freddy’s Cat-type pet/sidekick thrown in for good measure.

And so it is. But here’s the thing : while it may, indeed, be every bit as obvious as it seems at first glance, and while it may be as all-over-the-map in terms of its effectiveness (or lack thereof) as any “gag humor” comic aimed squarely at the stoner crowd, it’s so damn unpretentious, and utterly lacking in fucks to give, that you can’t help…

Horror and humor are often a potent mix — as any fan of films like Frankenhooker or Street Trash can tell you (and, for the record, I’m “guilty” as charged on both counts) —but, more often than not, humor is the “senior partner,” if you will, in the pairing, largely because it’s easier to make someone laugh at atrocious shit than to show them how frightening the stuff we laugh at can actually be. A pure half-and-half serving of each is perhaps an even more rare thing to come by — and the challenge to create precisely that when you’re dealing with subject matter that delves into the existential ? Well, that’s a fairly stiff one indeed.

Still, it seems that’s the task Josh Simmons set for himself with his just-released mini Ghouls, a self-published series of single-panel cartoons that begins with an “abandon hope, all ye who enter…

We’ve all been there — you’re sitting on a plane, or a train, or a bus, and some nosy asshole plunks down next to you and starts asking all sorts of invasive questions, most likely because they’re both bored and boring. After all, when you haven’t got much of a life yourself, then you become unnaturally interested in the lives of others. But what if the person who started nosing around in your business had motivations beyond merely alleviating the tedium of their existence?

That’s the premise behind Josh Simmons’ latest self-published mini (well, okay, it’s only a “mini” in terms of length — as far as its physical format goes, it’s magazine-sized and offset-printed) Micky, an intense short story that plays to its artist’s strengths as the small press scene’s most accomplished purveyor of visceral horror. But the visceral only hits home as anything beyond…