Michael Aushenker is nuts.

I mean that in the best possible way, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the time to, and incur the expense of, tracking down some of his more recent stuff after he generously forwarded me a package of his older works a little while back. The “vintage” material is uniformly awesome, as well, but since I’d like you, dear reader, to be able to experience the patented Aushenker insanity for yourself, we’ll be concentrating here on books I know damn well are fairly easy to find.

Trolls follows the — uhhmmm — exploits of deadbeat air traffic controllers Edward and Wayward, two semi-human (I think?) ne’er-do-wells (hell, ne’er-do-anythings, truth be told) who’d rather pig out and sleep than work, unless the boss is off, in which case they’d rather party than work. Kinda like you and me? Maybe — if you refuse to grow up…

When the going gets tough, the tough go — north?

Obviously the future Earth as conceived of by writer Rob Sheridan and artist Barnaby Bagenda for their new DC/Vertigo series, High Level (the first issue of which will be hitting your LCS shelves on Feb. 20th), doesn’t have any of this “Polar Vortex” bullshit going on, but that doesn’t mean it’s absent its own share of problems — what Sheridan refers to as his “post-post-apocalyptic” premise is rife with the resource shortages, social and economic stratification, and violent mercenary assholes anyone who’s seen films ranging from The Road Warrior to Exterminators Of The Year 3000 is well-familiar with, but don’t let this comic’s decidedly “old-school” sensibilities about, as The King himself would put it, “The World That’s Coming!,” fool you into believing that it doesn’t present something new. Maybe not radically new, mind you (frankly it’s too soon to tell)…

What can you get done in four hours? Clean the house? File your taxes? Re-arrange your bookshelves? Work half your shift?

Max Clotfelter can crank out some pretty damn cool comic strips, and he’s been doing so for five years as part of Seattle’s monthly Dune meet-up/comics “jam,” a regular ritual that challenges cartoonists to literally write and draw “whatever comes to mind.”

Clotfelter’s always been wildly inventive, of course, creating comics that bridge the stylistic and thematic gap from old-school undergrounds to present-day “aht comics,” but perusing the contents of his recently-released Rat Tactics ‘zine shows something of a hitherto-unremarked-upon (as far as I know, at any rate) evolution in his work, albeit in severely, wondrously truncated form : the yarns at the start, dating back to 2012, are rough-hewn affairs with little by way of concern for even storytelling basics, much less actual narrative, pesky little concerns…

You read a headline like that and most likely think, naturally enough, “okay, but which cartoonist?” And then you probably realize, just as quickly, “oh, duh — himself, of course!” Congratulations on being exactly right.

We’ve talked about Cole Johnson’s self-published minis a couple of times here before, and my earnest hope is that we’ll be able to continue to do so for a long time to come, because this is an artist who has staked out a territory all his own by simply doing the kinds of things he does better than anyone else. Longing for times, friends, lovers gone; restlessness of the heart and mind; the transposing of unfocused affection onto life’s “little things”; ennui of the body and spirit — these are all something more than themes “within his wheelhouse,” they are his raison d’etre; his animating passion; his alpha, omega, and all points between. And nowhere…

“There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.”

So Rod Serling told us, at any rate, but there’s simply no convincing the subconscious mind of that, is there? As a result, darkness, through no fault of its own, has become the go-to metaphor for negativity, depression, evil, you name it. Difficult or challenging times in life are “dark” times. The historical era dominated by superstition and anti-intellectualism is referred to as the “Dark Ages.” Encroaching despair is the “darkness closing in on us.”

It’s primal. It’s instinctive. Our rational minds know that it makes no sense, but nevertheless — darkness isn’t just symbolic of fear, it’s symbolic of all fear, of the fear. The fear of losing ourselves into all-encompassing, all-devouring nothingness.

Laura Lannes understands this more intuitively than any cartoonist working today, and I say that without a moment’s hesitation. Her strips in…

Navigating the present social, political, and economic reality is tough enough — how are you supposed to get your own head together in the midst of all this chaos?

Cartoonist Mike Taylor’s stand-in/protagonist Adam (and, yes, eventually that’s revealed to be as obvious a choice of name as you’re already imagining it to be), our one and only point of reference in and, in a very real sense, entry into, the metaphysical realms beyond and within detailed in the new graphic novel In Christ There Is No East Or West, is tasked with such a challenge and has the added burden of having been conscripted into this impromptu bit of soul-searching by none other than God himself — but not until after he discards his ever-present “smart” phone at The Almighty’s insistence.

Taylor has, of course, long been on a very public journey of self-discovery in the pages of his…

It goes without saying that almost every nominally “indie” cartoonist has a Patreon site of their own these days — but a few of us critics are getting in on the act, too, and it’s high time we devoted a Weekly Reading Round-Up column to them (okay, us), because all their (alright, our) stuff really is worth reading!

Daniel Elkin’s Your Chicken Enemy is the go-to “clearing house” for all things small press, not only because he now runs two reviews each week from voices both seasoned and fresh, and not only because his “In Case You Missed It” column is the single-best resource for finding out who wrote about what and where week in, week out, but because he actually pays his contributors! You do indeed get what you pay for, as the saying goes, and if you wonder how Elkin consistently gets the best content for his site…

When you craft a deeply moving, bittersweet, painfully resonant, obviously allegorical fable that features a protagonist who isn’t human, that’s one thing. When it features a protagonist who isn’t human and isn’t even alive yet? That’s something else altogether. In fact, it’s downright amazing.

And that’s absolutely what Jenny Zervakis’ 2016 (although it’s only just now getting some distribution) self-published mini, Out Of The Nest, is. Ostensibly a simple, somewhat sad tale of a wayward birds’ egg that rolls out of its — you guessed it —nest, in actuality this is a poignant rumination on safety and security of both the physical and emotional varieties, the fragility of life and the relationships we have during (or before) it, and loss. If that sounds like a lot to accomplish in 16 single-panel pages, well, it is — but it’s a task Zervakis accomplishes not so much with ease, but…