None of the strips in cartoonist Harry Nordlinger’s 2019 self-published “solo creator” horror anthology comic Softer Than Sunshine run more than four pages — hell, a good many of them are only a single page long — but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth contemplating. Absorbing. Soaking in. Examining your reactions to.

Yes, they’re punchy and precisely-timed by design, not unlike the classic EC horror tales of yesteryear, but they don’t  necessarily resort to tight-form narrative — or even narrative at all — to achieve their desired effect. “The kind of thing that crawls under your skin” is an overused term to be sure, but Nordlinger takes it a step further — or maybe that should be a step, or better yet an inch, deeper. These are horror shorts — some “tales,” sure, others more accurately described as scenarios — that burrow under your skin, that take hold and…

Okay, if you want to be absolutely technical about things, Andrew Alexander’s 2018 magazine-sized (printed on heavy gray cardstock paper, in garish blue ink) comic Twenty One Fifty Fiverr is eight pages long, but that’s including front and back covers, which is kinda fudging the numbers a bit, even though I do like to do everything I can to “upsell” quality self-published works like this one. Either way you slice it, though, there’s no denying this comic is short — but, just as inarguable is the fact that it packs one hell of a punch.

How to describe this visceral experience? Well, on the one hand it reminds one of Gary Panter in a pinch, sure, but on the other it’s far more concerned with the utterly grotesque and revels in its place in the gutter. I can’t see Alexander’s work being allowed through the hallowed gates of the “fine”…

Everyday life is weird enough, but it’s also nowhere near weird enough — and that’s where Stella Murphy’s cartooning comes in, specifically her 2019 Caboose-published collection Hometime, which defuses the tension inherent in much of what passes for commonplace domesticity by operating on it like a surgeon. Her humor is her scalpel, and she utilizes it with precision, but she confines her cuts to the margins and then stands back and allows the fissures to spread and grow.

It’s an approach that works — hell, it works spectacularly and consistently — but it takes an awful lot of nerve and an awful lot of trust. And in order to be effective, of course, trust has to be a two-way street, so Murphy places as much of it in her readers as she does in her own abilities. Where other artists go for the obvious, then, she goes for…

As far as thought-provoking and challenging exercises in formalism and sub-minimalism go, they don’t come much more formalist or sub-minimalist than prolific cartoonist Sean Christensen’s 2019 self-published mini Performance Video, an admittedly curious contemporary artifact that’s as notable for what it does as what it is — although by the end, whether or not there’s any distinction between the two is very much an open question.

And, in fairness, open questions are rather at the core of what Christensen is getting at in this work, for which the antiquated term “avant-garde” is woefully inadequate. Christensen starts and ends with the most basic of basic linework that wordlessly refers either forward and backward to the text, respectively — but that text is the backbone of the project, blue-rendered hand lettering split, like the art, into six-panel grids on each page, with four lines of wording per panel being the standard…

I first came across the work of Samuel Benson when, in fairness, he came across me and sent me a copy of his impressively strange full-length comic A Different Sky, a post-psychedelic exploration of altered consciousness, sci-fi high weirdness, and quasi-magical birds from a stoner/slacker perspective that struck a cord with its idiosyncratic dialogue, bizarre-yet-logically-consistent plotting, and just plain intense art, a combination of belabored cross-hatching, big eyes, nervous faces, and gritty urban rendering. It was quite unlike anything else in recent memory, but as it turns out that’s only because my “sample size” of Benson’s own work was pretty small.

In truth, unbeknownst to me until very recently, Benson has been self-publishing a magazine-formatted series called Long Gone Comix, the third issue of which just recently came out, and tonally and stylistically and artistically it serves up much the same kind of “far-out” cartooning A Different Sky

Succinctly but accurately billing itself as “a collection of comics and drawings by Abby Jame” by its publisher, Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club, 2019’s High + Shy isn’t necessarily more than that — but, then again, it sort of is. And while it took me some time to get around to reading it — these are the things that happen when you’re damn near literally swimming in review copies — the simple fact is that it hit me in just the right way at just the right time.

By way of explanation, at least for those who don’t know, your friendly (usually) critic here lives precisely one block from the scene of George Floyd’s horrific murder on 38th & Chicago in south Minneapolis, and reading comics just didn’t factor into my daily routine for a number of days there because, well, there was no such thing a thing as a…

A simple story, well told, is always worth its weight in gold — a sentiment that’s perhaps never been more true than in these troubled and troubling times — and when he’s really hit on a nugget of an idea, when he’s firing on all cylinders creatively, a simple story, well told, is precisely the kind of thing that Columbus, Ohio’s Brian Canini excels at. Guess what? In his latest self-published (under the auspices of his Drunken Cat Comics imprint) mini,  Across The Diner, he’s hit on a nugget of an idea and is firing on all cylinders creatively.

Still here? ‘Cuz, I mean, I just pretty well gave away the game, which — at least according to what passes for conventional “wisdom” — is supposed to be seriously poor form. Even if what you’re saying is true — which, in this case, it absolutely is — you’re…

Apropos of perhaps nothing in terms of the overall scope of this review, but definitely worth a mention : Brian Canini is the most organized cartoonist around. Every few months, like clockwork, I get a nice little package from him containing his latest review submissions, complete with a little letter containing a brief synopsis of each. This is the kind of critical outreach that is very appealing to me and, I would guess, other critics, as it shows he is downright eager to have us check out his stuff, and he’s always been more than magnanimous about any critiques I may have about his work, taking them in the constructive manner in which they’re intended. And if that isn’t a natural segue right there, I don’t know what is.

Cutting to the chase, then, one of the two new minis from his own Drunken Cat Comics imprint that I sat…