Not so long ago, I was pretty rough on the first issue of cartoonist Jai Granofsky’s self-published “solo anthology” series, What The Actual. I found it unfocused, uninspired, unfunny, and uninteresting. I took no pleasure in raking the book over the coals — I never do, particularly when it comes to “labors of love” — but I think (or at least I hope) that I avoided laying a “give it up and stick with the day job” type of trip on the artist himself. Certainly his solid “classical cartooning” style provides evidence enough that Granofsky has some talent, but my feeling was that his entire project was in need of a good, solid “re-think” from top to bottom.

Enter the just-released What The Actual #2, which isn’t exactly a complete re-tooling, but at least represents a kind of promising, albeit tentative, step in the right direction — and…

Sometimes, as a writer, you like to throw little challenges at yourself, just to make things more interesting — especially when it comes to long-running columns such as this. My self-appointed challenge this week : to see if I can crank out one of these Round-Ups in 30 minutes or less. Let’s see how that goes —

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang ride off into the sunset with Paper Girls #30, the conclusion to their long-running Spielbergian fan-favorite series from Image, and as far as finales go, this one’s a clinic : we start with a dream sequence, we then return to the “real world” much as our memory-wiped protagonists have, and how much they will or might remember is sorta the theme here. Lots of gorgeous double-page spreads give this extra-length issue a little extra “breathing room” to say a proper good-bye to the girls, and all in…

I’ve got something of a love/hate relationship with Robert Sergel — most of Eschew missed the mark in my estimation, ditto for September 12th — but when he hits, goddamn does he hit. Bald Knobber is the kind of comic Charles Forsman has always been desperately trying to make, and Joe Bonaparte is quietly, darkly sublime stuff. His latest Kilgore mini, Desolation Bay, looked intriguing to me simply because it seems a step well outside his wheelhouse, being set in 1831 Patagonia, and because the green-yellow color palette marks an abrupt and exciting change from his usual (very) black-and-white artwork. I always appreciate steps into the unknown, even if/when they come up short, just because a comfortable cartoonist is a dull cartoonist, and I give Sergel props — even when his stuff doesn’t “click” with me, it’s never dull.

This ambitious little number is no exception, focused as it…

Michael Aushenker is one of those folks that I automatically associate with one particular genre of comics storytelling — that being slapstick humor — but then, I also consider him to be a cartoonist who draws as well as writes his own material. What the hell do I know, though? His latest self-published release, The Ghost Pirate, puts paid to both of those notions in that it’s decidedly not aimed directly at the funnybone and is also, in point of fact, a collaboration with artist Marcus Collar that relegates Aushenker to scripting duties only.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that if you think you know “what to expect” from a Michael Aushenker comic — as I surely did — you’re in for something of a surprise here.

A time-twisting tale that starts off in 1775 with our titular pirate, who answers to the name of Molitar…

Nigel Bach has a lot to answer for.

I’ve talked about his Bad Ben series of films quite a bit on this site, of course, but leaving out their relative merits (or lack thereof) for a moment here, the simple fact is that their (relative) success has inspired a small legion of wannabe-filmmakers armed with nothing but their iPhones and, I suppose, a dream. One of them is Jeff Profitt, and the fruit of his labors is the just-released-to-Amazon-streaming Something Crashed In The Woods. Don’t let the title fool you, though — nothing “crashes in the woods” here (at least as far as we can see), but at about the ten-minute mark your interest level in the film itself will crash mightily, and never recover.

Profitt himself is the sole “actor” in the film, and he plays an unnamed dude who buys his dream “fixer-upper” cabin and intends to…

Once upon a time, a rag-tag group of ambitious filmmakers headed out to rural Pennsylvania with an amateur cast, a camera, no money, and a dream. The end result, George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead, achieved cinematic immortality not only for itself, but for almost all of those involved in its production.

Fast-forward to 2016 (although it wouldn’t achieve release until two years later, and via Amazon Prime streaming at that) and Nicholas Pontoski crowd-funded a $15K production budget, grabbed some friends, and hoped history might — just might — repeat itself. The end result, Within The Woods Of Undead County, is having a tough time standing out in the streaming queue shuffle. but is actually probably worth your time to check out — provided your expectations are held in check.

We’re talking about fairly standard-issue stuff here, at least in terms of Pontoski and co-screenwriter…

With his debut graphic novel, Bicycle Day, Brooklyn-based cartoonist and commercial illustrator Brian Blomerth has set for himself a fairly daunting challenge : to not just illustrate, but to visually communicate, a historical “first.” And not just any historical “first” at that, but one that involved entering another state of consciousness altogether — I refer to the world’s very first acid trip, deliberately undertaken by Swiss chemist/armchair mystic Albert Hofmann on April 19th, 1943, ostensibly as part of his daily research duties for the Sandoz pharmaceutical corporation.

The first thing he did after “turning on”? Apologies to Freddie Mercury, but — get on his bike and ride!

Of course, any number of rock album/poster artists (of which Blomerth can number himself) have produced deliberately “trippy” images over the years, but by and large the “target market” for this type of artwork, and the recordings and/or concerts it advertises…