This week’s “top-line” takeaway : two new Black Label debuts (or maybe that should be two more new Black Label debuts) from DC, and Dark Horse spirals into spin-off hell — but does it well? Let’s get right to it —

Horror novelist Carmen Maria Machado and Coffin Bound artist Dani collaborate on what’s got to be the most promising first issue yet from Joe Hill’s Black Label sub-sub-imprint, Hill House Comics, The Low, Low Woods #1 — and that’s pretty high praise when you consider that Hill and Leomacs’ Basketful Of Heads and Mike Carey, Peter Gross, and Vince Locke’s The Dollhouse Family have already come out of the gate damn strong. This one centers on a pair of young, queer girls of color trying their best to get by in the shithole mining town of Shudder-To-Think, Pennsylvania, which has been plagued by a constantly-raging underground coal fire…

Taking an experimental approach — visually, conceptually, thematically — to the well-trod ground that is memoir is no easy task, but weaving that experimentation into the metaphorical “DNA” of the work itself ups the ante considerably, and requires both sure-footed artistic skill as well as a fair amount of confidence in one’s vision form the get-go. As evidence for this assertion, I give you Paula Lawrie’s recently-self-published ‘zine My Geometric Family, a collection of single-page illustrations with accompanying text that bring to life formative experiences from the artist’s youth in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the added wrinkle of presenting everyone’s heads as a hodge-podge of various geometric (you saw that coming) shapes, thereby imbuing the proceedings with a pretty heavy layer of surrealism that both belies and accentuates their prosaic origins. Don’t ask me how that contradiction works itself out on the page, but it does…

Walker Tate’s comics have a way of clinging in the back of your mind and staying there for extended periods — and given that this is the second of his works I’ve reviewed in the past week or so (the other being his most recent, Cloggel, the cover of which appears at the bottom of this review as a friendly reminder for you to, ya know, buy it), you can safely surmise that they’ve been clawing their way to the forefront of mine in recent days. And so they have. This is largely down to the fact that they lend themselves to careful consideration, as you’ve no doubt guessed, but they just as surely eschew immediate interpretation and classification, instead going the slow-burn route of conceptual percolation, for lack of a better term, until the reader finally either has a “Eureka!” moment or, more likely, achieves a kind of…

What the hell is this, anyway? A review of a four-page mini? Am I nuts?

Well, yeah, I am — but that’s nothing new. What is new is the idea that there could, indeed, be a four-page mini worth devoting more than a quick 150-word paragraph to talking about, but such is indeed the case with Abby Jame’s latest from Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club, Lizard Daddies. I don’t expect this to happen too often, mind you, but Jame’s work is always worthy of examination on some level, and this one touches on so many relevant cultural themes in so few pages that the word “extraordinary” comes to mind pretty quickly and easily.

The set-up here is as immediately grabbing as one would assume it to be : a group of teenage girls decide to attend a “sugar daddy/sugar baby” party to fleece some cash out of some horny old…

Sam Spina is one of those cartoonists who never strayed too far from his DIY roots — and for that, we should all be thankful.

You never know when one of his new self-published minis is going to hit, nor what it’s going to be about, but you can be sure of a couple things without fail : whatever he comes up with is going to be funny, and it’s going to make you think just a little bit, too. These are both good things, of course, but lots of comics manage to do them — what sets Spina’s work apart, then, is a little something extra that we’ll just call, for lack of a better term, charm.

Which, if we’re being honest, is a well-nigh impossible thing to quantify and is entirely subjective in the extreme, but still — you know it when you see it, and you’re…

Looks like we’re back on the first issue train in a big way this week — even if one of them’s a one-shot. And since that one-shot is the comic that everyone is talking about right this very moment, that’s where we’ll start things off —

Frank Miller goes back to the well (that’s been rather unwell) with Dark Knight Returns : The Golden Child #1, presented in the old school “Dark Knight Format” that it pioneered (this time under DC’s Black Label imprint), with sumptuous art from the criminally under-utilized-in-recent-years Rafael Grampa, who’s infused his sleek, cinematic style with a little bit more Dave Cooper-esque physical “ripple” than we’ve seen from him in the past while maintaining the overall aesthetic of his Geoff Darrow-by-way-of- Moebius roots. The result is a book that looks absolutely gorgeous and earns a “buy” recommendation for the art alone, with the generally fun…

Truth be told, Walker Tate is one of those cartoonists whose would I damn well should have covered by now, but with the release of his latest self-published comic, Cloggel, now’s as good an occasion as any to make up for lost time — and, conveniently enough, for readers new to Tate’s work, this book provides more or less the perfect introduction to his genuinely iconoclastic artistic vision.

No less an authority than Austin English has said that Tate carries on in the tradition of the great John Hankiewicz, and while I’m not here to argue with that, I’d like to point out that his clean-line style and sparse, economic scripting also bring to mind latter-period Ditko, yet if he’s carved something of a middle ground between those two artists, it’s one all his own, as his comics pay not even so much as lip service or a hat-tip…

Ten years is a pretty healthy amount of time to stick with anything, especially a labor of love that probably doesn’t bring you in much (if any) cash, but comics writer/self-publisher Jonathan Baylis has manged to do just that and the latest issue of his now long-running series, So Buttons #10, marks a decade in the trenches, telling stories about his life, as well as events, people, and places adjacent to it. And whaddya know? It might just be his best to date.

Before we delve into the contents too deeply, it’s probably worth remarking upon the fact that Baylis has proved the naysayers who initially dismissed him as a Harvey Pekar clone wrong — yeah, he does things the way ol’ Harv did, hiring freelance cartoonists to draw his short vignette-style strips, but that’s about where the similarities end, as Baylis has cultivated a voice and perspective all his…