We might get an extra day this year, and it might even be today, but there were still only seven days this week — don’t ask me how that works. In any case, there was a hell of a lot that hit LCS shelves this week, and I’ve chosen four brand-spanking-new debuts to give the once-over, so here they are, arranged in descending order of quality —

Tomorrow #1 comes our way courtesy of editor Karen Berger and her Berger Books imprint at Dark Hose, and teams veteran scribe Peter Milligan with artist Jesus Hervas, continuing this line’s interesting pattern of pairing the old with the new. Milligan, for his part, used to be one of the most interesting and radical writers in the business — Enigma still ranks among my top ten comics of all time —but he’s been a pretty serious hit-or-miss proposition in recent years, with certain…

When you give your autobio comics project an expansive title, you’re either pretty damn confident that elements of the universal are plainly on offer in the everyday routines of your life, or you’re just delusional. New Orleans-based cartoonist Kyle Bravo has been at it for awhile now, so if he’s delusional, he’s doing a damn good job of hiding it, but based on the evidence offered in his latest self-published mini, Forever & Everything #5, that was probably never a serious concern, anyway. Rather, he does a really nice job of finding something borderline-transcendent in the mundane, and the only thing deliberately grandiose is — yup, that name.

Still, if the shoe fits, right? Naturally, one of the first people you think of when you think of “this sort of thing” in a general sense is Jeffrey Brown, and his influence on the way Bravo structures his strips is fairly…

When you boil the art of cartooning down to its basic elements, you sometimes end up creating work that reminds people just why they love this medium so much in the first place — provided your sensibilities as an artist are sound to begin with, of course. When it comes to Karen Sneider, that’s something you literally never have to worry about; sensibilities come no more sound than hers.

Sneider’s latest self-published mini, Diary Of A Monster, is as immediately bizarre as it is inarguably recognizable, imbued with a kind of universal populist appeal that guarantees almost anyone will find it funny by doing something simple and timeless throughout : putting weird characters in everyday situations and finding a kernel of humor in all of them that’s easy to relate to and well-timed in its placement. The kind of thing that makes you think to yourself while you’re reading…

Once in awhile, you have one of those weeks that reminds you why you love going to the comic shop on Wednesday — assuming, that is, that you actually do go to the comic shop on Wednesday. If you do, here are some things that you may have picked up. If you don’t, here are some things that you may (or may not, your call) want to pick up next time you’re there —

Going back to the Marvel Zombies rip-off well, writer Tom Taylor revisits his breakout hit concept of last year (one of the few to come from DC in recent memory) with DCeased : Unkillables #1, the debut intstallment of a three-part series that shows what the villains got up to while the heroes were all (okay, mostly) getting either wiped out or fucked by Darkseid’s infamous Anti-Life Equation being unleashed on Earth and turning everyone affected…

Apparently in the works for several years before its debut at CAB late last year (at least if the catalogue number attached to it by its publisher, Retrofit/Big Planet, is to be believed — and why wouldn’t it be?), it’s perhaps easier to define Andrew Lorenzi’s visionary graphic story cycle, Multo, by what it isn’t rather than what it actually is — taken as a whole the work has a distinct rhythm, but not a progression; it’s not strictly a work of comics poetry, but its overall effect is poetic; and while it’s technically a memoir, most of the incidents it depicts have an ethereal, dreamlike quality to them.

Showcasing Lorenzi’s multi-faceted talents along a stylistic continuum nearly as broad as that of cartoonists such as Tommi Musturi or Karl Stevens, this generously (and necessarily) oversized volume relates its autobiographical contents by means of painting, embroidery…

It’s not every day that a long-form comics project (or, if you like, a “graphic novel”) gets its own separately-published postscript, much less one that takes the form of an eight-page mini comic presented in full color whereas the book it refers back to is in black and white — but we live in unusual times, as evidenced by the fact that I’m even reviewing an eight-page mini in the first place.

That being said, fellow Twin Cities resident Lance Ward has lived through much stranger times than these during his periods of addiction and subsequent recovery, and some of those are chronicled in The Truth Behind Blood And Drugs, the rather quickly-issued “epilogue” of sorts to last year’s celebrated Blood And Drugs that comes our way courtesy of the same publisher, J.T. Yost’s Birdcage Bottom Books. And while I’m not prepared to go so far as to call…

I was thoroughly transfixed by the first self-published issue of Paula Lawrie’s My Geometric Family and her unique approach to blending the surreal with the real to illustrate the beauty and vagaries of the nature of memory in equal measure, and the promise that more installments were forthcoming was exciting news indeed, but I really have to give her credit for getting #2 out so quickly and for not only maintaining the high standard of quality she’d already established, but broadening and deepening the scope of her project and finding ways to increase its thematic resonance in a manner entirely unforced and organic. Simply put, this is an artist who appears to be getting more confident with her vision as she goes — and she was approaching already it with plenty of confidence from the starting gate.

As Lawrie continues her childhood memoir in this issue, the central event affecting…

It’s always a tricky thing, when you want to convince people to not just read, but actually buy a comic — yet you don’t want to give much, if anything, of said comic away. Such is the case with the second issue of Alex Nall’s self-published series Kids With Guns, so I guess the best way to go here is to proceed with caution — just as I probably would if confronted by, say, an armed child.

I gave the first issue of this comic high marks, but I was expecting something of a slow burn — the unusual, but for all intents and purposes reciprocal and healthy, inter-generational friendship between 10-year-old Milo and his eighty-year-old neighbor, Mel, was the focal point of that debut installment, and while there were hints that the provocative title Nall chose for this project was going to come into play at some point…