Don’t look now, but there’s a new publisher on the scene. AWA (short for Artists Writers & Artisans) is the brainchild of a pair of former Marvel head honchos (Axel Alonso and Bill Jemas), and right in the midst of the COVD-19 pandemic they’ve rolled out their Upshot comics imprint with no less than four titles in one week. Let’s take a look at ’em —

Unquestionably the “flagship” release of the company’s first wave is The Resistance #1, featuring the return to comics of one-time “fan favorite” writer J. Michael Straczynski, here teamed with superstar artist Mike Deodato Jr. This book has one of those immediately “ready for Hollywood” type of premises, centered as it is upon a global disaster (seem familiar?) that suddenly and inexplicably causes several thousand survivors across the globe to manifest super powers in its wake. I dunno, the story’s competent enough and plenty interesting…

It’s a safe bet that we’ve all been there — somebody’s having a party at their place, and your ex might be there, mutual friends being what they are and all that. There’s no one you’re more terrified of seeing on the one hand, but there’s no one you’re dying to see more on the other. What’s a forlorn “20-something” to do — besides drink to excess, of course?

Welcome to the familiar world of Lauren Monger’s Sleepwalking, a frankly amazing full-color mini originally published by an outfit called Space Face Books in 2015 and re-printed in a more widely-available edition of 2000 by Silver Sprocket last year. And as far as “work deserving of a bigger audience” goes, this one was right at the top of the list for some time, so I’m glad that such a situation has finally come to pass.

Centered on a large ensemble…

Image Comics dominated my admittedly-small pull list this week, so let’s have a look at all four of their books that I picked up and see which ones are worth your time and money —

Jonathan Hickman is back with another typically ambitious and expansive creator-owned project, but the best thing about Decorum #1 is Mike Huddleston’s wildly varied, and in some cases quite experimental, art. Yeah, there’s some intriguing “world-building” going on here — hell, it’s more than that, it’s “universe-building” — but, as with all things Hickman, we’ll have to see how fully he develops all that, or even if he fucking sticks with it. For my money, the only one of his Image projects where the steak matched the sizzle was East Of West, but let’s be fair : they’ve all started out well enough, and this tale of the universe’s most purportedly polite assassin…

It might be fairly stated that Swedish cartoonist Disa Wallander appears to have one over-arching concern running through all her work, but given that said concern is the nature of the creative process itself and its centrality to the phenomenon of identity, it’s at the very least a perhaps-infinitely expansive one that’s more than able to subsume any number of “smaller” ones within it, cast them in a new and more considered light, and then return to taking a more “macro,” all-encompassing view. The remarkable thing, though, is that she’s got, for lack of a more readily-available term, a “knack” for transitioning from one exploration to the next with such fluidity that no matter how complex the conceptual themes she’s tackling may be, it all seems incredibly, well — basic? Simple?

Which sounds like either a polite brush-off or a roundabout compliment, I’ll grant you, but it points to an…

Just about any and every artist that ever lived has been plagued with periods of self-doubt and creative bankruptcy, but the truly ingenious among them have found  ways to use those dark times as inspiration — after all, if you can’t rise above it, why not explore it for all it’s worth? It seemed like every book Stephen King wrote for a good decade or more was about a writer who had hit a brick wall, and cartoonists like Robert Crumb and Joe Matt have literally built their careers around unflattering portrayals of what happens (or doesn’t happen) when their creative wellsprings run dry.

This is all minor-league stuff, though, compared with manga legend Yoshiharu Tsuge’s The Man Without Talent, the unflattering self-portrait to end all unflattering self-portraits, largely because it eschews any sort of overt plays for sympathy in favor of a raw, unvarnished, sometimes even dispassionate examination…

I’ll be the first to admit that most weeks these Round-Up columns are just my way of keeping up with what’s happening in the comics mainstream, and truth be told my “pull list” is so small compared to that of many of my readers that I often have a difficult time finding four books that I even feel like talking about. This week was a glorious exception, however — one of those weeks where yeah, I maybe spent a little too much, but I was reminded of why I even stick with the ritual of heading down to my LCS on Wednesdays in the first place. Yeah, we all know that small-press comics are cool, but ya know what? The “Big Two” and the major indies still put out some damn good stuff too, and this week they hit us with four first issues that are well worth anyone’s time…

Ah, bliss. Ever since a collected volume of cartoonist extraordinaire John Pham’s beloved strips featuring hard-luck “lovable losers” Jay and Kay was released in France a couple of years ago, English-speaking audiences have been waiting for  a version we can actually, ya know, read — but the demand for it was so strong that I truthfully know a few people who ordered the French version just to look at the thing.

It’s easy enough to see why — Pham’s cartooning skill is matched only by his artistry with the risograph, a printing method that he stands as one of the absolute masters of, and who are we kidding? Each issue of his self-published Epoxy sells out so quickly, despite its high price, that for many people these are comics they’ve only heard about in reverent near-whispers to date, but have never actually seen outside of, say, Kramers Ergot. Well…

Hailing as she does from Stockholm, Sweden, Moa Romanova’s name isn’t one that is particularly well-known here in the US — but I have a distinct feeling that her Fantagraphics-published debut graphic novel, Goblin Girl, is going to change all that in a hurry. Toeing a tightrope-line between pure autobio and fictionalized faux-memoir, with the distinction between which “parts” of the book are which never being explicitly delineated, this is a seamless and powerful work that navigates the always-choppy waters of mental illness with raw honesty, emotion, and a sense of authenticity so profound that it almost doesn’t even matter how much of it is derived from Romanova’s daily life or not.

That being said, she’s still clearly finding her voice as a cartoonist, at least on the artistic side of the ledger : her panel layouts, lettering, backgrounds, color choices, and caricature-ish flourishes owe a lot to…