The welcome news that Max Clotfleter, the enfant terrible of the Seattle cartooning scene, will finally be seeing the first comprehensive collection of his comics coming out later this year — courtesy of Birdcage Bottom Books and bearing the title Rooftop Stew (the cover of which is pictured near the bottom of this review) —shouldn’t obscure the fact that he’s been been cobbling together much of his work from parts various and sundry for several years now in the pages of his self-published series Andros, the eighth and most recent issue of which is probably as fine an example of “Clotfelter in microcosm” as you’re likely to find. Assuming, of course, that finding such a thing would be of interest to you.

And hey, who are we kidding? It certainly should be. There’s no doubt that much of Clotfelter’s sensibility emerges from the “confessional/autobio” tradition — see, for example…

A visually lurid and kaleidoscopic amalgamation of the fragmentary, the jumbled, the confused/confusing, and a good deal of the utterly inexplicable, Jason T. Miles’ mini My Fanny #1 (self-published under his G.O.A.T. imprint) is nevertheless a rewarding experience — just don’t ask me to be able to quantify why that’s the case.

Which, I suppose, negates the whole idea of me positioning myself as a “critic” in the first place, but shit — that’s Miles for you. Few cartoonists are as adept as he is at defying everything you think you know about anything, mostly by dint of just ignoring all that exists outside of his own very particular set of sensibilities and/or instincts, and getting you to either buy in or, failing that, simply get the fuck out of his way. There’s no guidebook to either making or reading comics like this, so — go with the flow…

Ostensibly a sequel to her earlier, and justly well-received,  The Song Of Aglaia, French cartoonist Anne Simon’s newly-released-in-English (and in color!) The Empress Cixtisis (originally published in 2014 under the title Cixtite Imperatrice) is something rather more than that, in actuality — I mean, yeah, Aglaia’s back and all, but she’s just one of a pair of dueling pro/antagonists, the other being our titular Empress, who is herself a barely-concealed (to say nothing of bitingly sardonic) stand-in for the “real life” Empress Dowager Cixi of China, who effectively ruled that country for nearly 50 years. We’ve got an ambitious and multi-faceted text going on here, then, but here’s the thing with Simon — no matter how conceptually and theoretical dense her work may be, it’s never anything less than a pure joy to read.

In fact, my one and only complaint about The Empress Cixtisis is that, at…

So — who do we believe? Over at TCJ, inexplicably popular critic Matt Seneca used his review of Hartley Lin’s recently-released Pope Hats #6 as a platform for anti-natalist proselytizing and to burnish his “edgelord” bone fides, while at Sequential State, my friend Alex Hoffman adorned it with glowing praise, admittedly filtered though his own parental sensibilities. Can they both be right and/or wrong?

Well — theoretically, sure. But as circumstance would have it, I find myself leaning more toward “Team Hoffman” on this one, although I don’t see the latest issue of the long-running AdHouse Books series, which carries the title of “Shapeshifter,” as a revolutionary departure for anyone but cartoonist Lin himself, who telegraphs his intentions early on by ditching his “Ethan Rilly” pseudonym and positioning himself as being smaller in stature than his infant son and a toy (?) ladybug on the comic’s cover. He’s still…

Densely atmospheric, detailed yet scratchy, erotically charged, Gothic in the truest sense of the word, and falling along a stylistic continuum somewhere between Edgar Allen Poe and Dame Darcy, cartoonist Julia Gfrorer (perhaps best known for her Fantagraphics-published Laid Waste and Black Is The Color) is a true autuer, someone whose vision, and well as its means of expression, are entirely and uniquely her own — even, perhaps paradoxically, when she’s not working alone, as is the case with her occasional collaborations with writer Sean T. Collins. For purposes of this week’s Round-Up, though, we’ll be concentrating on some examples of her solo work, specifically four extraordinary minis she self-published under her Thuban Press imprint —

I can sum up To Dark To See best, I think, with the words “haunting as fuck” because, whaddya know, it’s about fucking and haunting. And mistrust. And psychologically abusive relationships. And…

Sometimes a comic’s format is so utterly unique that it’s worth commenting on in and of itself — and may even raise it a notch or two in any given critic’s estimation. It shouldn’t, I suppose, be that way — the quality of the story and art really ought to be all that matters, in theory — but what if the publication in question is so innovative in terms of its physical presentation that said presentation becomes an integral aspect of the art itself?

This is particularly true in the case of a mini, where a limited number of pages necessarily makes the manner in which those pages are delivered to readers really stand out, for good or ill. Which brings us, an unforgivable two paragraphs in, to Max Huffman’s latest self-published mini, the intriguingly-titled Funky Dianetics.

This attractive riso-printed number that rolled off the presses in November of…

Ostensibly billed as a “mystery” by its publisher, Silver Sprocket, Gnartoons creator James The Stanton’s latest mini, I Think Our Friend Dan Might Be A Dolphin is, I suppose, just that — if only because you’ll be mystified as to why it’s labeled as such.

“Spoiler” alert, if such a thing is necessary : Dan is a dolphin. And a particularly randy and gluttonous one, it would seem, although for all I know maybe all dolphins are. Never having known one personally myself, I couldn’t say for sure. But there’s definitely something about Dan’s behavior that seems a bit — I dunno — over the top?

Maybe we’re just pre-disposed to think of dolphins as nature’s “good guys.” We’re told that they’re damn near as smart as we are — hell, we’re told by Douglas Adams that they’re even smarter. Which, given the recent course of human history, isn’t…

We’ve all had ’em — those days when you go in to work and just feel like high-tailing it in the other direction for reasons that are difficult to quantify as they are to ignore.

Work — who the hell came up with this idea? Does anyone, on their deathbed, lament not putting in enough hours on the job? Is selling away time you can’t get back in exchange for money you can’t take with you when you’re gone a fair deal no matter how much (or, is far more common in this day and age, how little) you’re being paid?

We all know the answer to these questions, of course. And yet most of us turn up at 9:00 AM (or whenever), clock in, and get down to business — and more often than not, it’s someone else’s business we’re getting down to. But if you’re in…