It’s always a pleasure to read something new (or, in this case, new-ish) from Paradise Systems, R. Orion Martin’s small-press imprint self-tasked with exposing the rest of the world to the joys and idiosyncrasies of contemporary Chinese “alternative” cartooning, and one of the more fascinating things they’re doing is trying to re-introduce to the cultural landscape the lianhuanhua, a once-popular publication format that presents short, “punchy,” one-panel-per-page stories in a pocket-sized package. We looked at one of these — Woshibai’s Migraine — a few months back, and now we turn our collective attention to Gantea’s Two Stories, a comic that, full disclosure, I was initially inclined to dismiss as being too self-consciously “cute” for its own good.

Here’s the thing, though — I get shit wrong. A lot. Just ask my wife. And this unassuming little booklet continues a string of very strong comics bearing this…

I don’t know what the fuck you can do with two bucks anymore.

Not only can you not got a beer with it, much less anything more interesting like, say, a hit of acid, you can barely get a candy bar or a goddamn Slim Jim. Two bucks, seriously, ain’t shit.

Max Clotfleter could probably get away with charging a lot more than that for his latest self-published mini, The Elements Of Rough, Volume Two — but that’s all he’s asking, and while it’s a tough little item to find outside the Seattle area (although I’m willing to bet John Porcellino’s Spit And A Half distro will have it up for sale sooner or later), it’s absolutely worth whatever effort you have to put in to track it down — as well as, of course, its two-dollar cover price.

The second in Clotfelter’s occasional series designed to answer the…

I’ll say one thing for the proverbial “third act” (actually, it might be more like the fourth or fifth) of Peter Bagge’s cartooning career — he picks some interesting subjects for his “graphic biographies.” From Margaret Sanger to Zora Neale Hurston to, now, Rose Wilder Lane, the women whose stories he relates have led full lives full of adventure, controversy, and accomplishment. Whether or not Bagge himself is the best person to be recounting their exploits is an open question — particularly in Hurston’s case — but it’s clear that he views all his de facto protagonists with a tremendous amount of respect, while fastidiously avoiding the easy trap that is dull, hero-worship hagiography.

So, yeah, that’s the good. Or part of it — the other big part being, of course, Bagge’s always-agreeable, “rubbery,” intrinsically eye-catching cartooning which, fair enough, hasn’t really changed or evolved since his Neat Stuff/

Killer stuff from Revival House Press is our focus this week! None of it “brand new,” but so what? All of it is still readily available from http://revivalhousepress.com/books/

The entire breadth and scope of existence is traversed by means of the shortest distance possible — that being from a “greasy spoon” diner to a mini-golf and video game “emporium” — in the pages of Chris Cilla’s 2014 flip-book Labyrinthectomy/Luncheonette, a kind of throwback to the days of Doug Allen and Gary Leib’s Idiotland in terms of tone, temperament, and style, but with some sort of hidden-in-plain-sight philosophical intent tying both halves together until they meet/mash up in the middle. Characters talk at, rather than to, each other in amusingly impenetrable non-sequitors, seemingly-incongruous actions flow one into the next with no regard to reason or even time, and robots, people, mutants, and anthropomorphic animals all happily (I guess)…

If there was anything tethering Will Cardini to the dull, consensus version of “reality” — and that’s a mighty big “if” — it’s gone now, as his imagination completely and utterly flies the coop with the release of his new self-published B&W full-sized comic (he calls it a “mini,” but it’s not) Urscape #1. The cosmic clashes of absolutes that were his stock in trade in earlier pubs such as Tales From The Hyperverse and Sphere Fear are here not so much jettisoned as naturally transitioned into those selfsame absolutes — in this case represented by his recurring protagonist Miizzzard — just being absolute and doing absolute sorts of things.

To that end, I think it’s safe to tell you that what you should expect here is a series of 20 full “splash” pages that don’t so much tell a story as simply become one.

Narrative was always a threadbare…

Say one thing for the DC Universe original streaming series Doom Patrol : its own internal tug-of-war, no doubt the design of “showrunner” Jeremy Carver, is working. Last week, we were pulled back into the ongoing psychodrama between Timothy Dalton’s “Chief” Niles Caulder and Alan Tudyk’s wonderfully depraved Mr. Nobody, and in the newest episode, “Frances Patrol,” we’re drawn back out in a major way, our focus shifted squarely back onto the makeshift “team” of super-misfits, who find themselves either “flying solo” or in hitherto-unseen pairings.

On the going it alone front, Matt Bomer/Matthew Zuk’s Larry Trainor (is he ever really “alone,” though, given the “Negative Spirit” he shares a body with?) has made the gutsy decision to meet, like it or not, with former flame John Bowers (played in the present day by Tom Fitzpatrick, in flashback by, as always, Kyle Clements), while the makeshift duos in April…

On the face of it, I’ve set myself a fool’s errand here : to review Avengers : Endgame on its own merits, completely divorced from its cultural context and all which came before it, may not even be possible. But once we get a few particulars out of the way, that’s precisely what I intend to do, those particulars being : This. Is. The. Biggest. Thing. Ever.

We’re talking the cinematic equivalent of your wedding day or the birth of your first kid — or so the Disney/Marvel marketing machine would have you believe, not that they’re necessarily wrong, depending on your own circumstances. The so-called “MCU” came into being when I was in my 30s, but I can only imagine what this must mean to people who literally grew up on this stuff. Ten years of big-budget spectacle after big-budget spectacle, all leading up to this — the