Editor/translator/curator/publisher R. Orion Martin is doing some seriously extraordinary things with his Paradise Systems imprint, bringing the best in contemporary “alternative” cartooning from China to these shores is sumptuously-formatted and impeccably-designed packages. These are some of the most utterly unique comics on the planet (no exaggeration), and well worth your time and money. Four of my favorite recent releases follow —

Friendship Forever by Inkee Wang occupies some bizarre middle ground between Simon Hanselmann and Austin English, with pliable, gelatinous, bulbous characters toiling away at a dark approximation of what, I guess, passes for “friendship.” But mostly they’re just assholes to each other because, hey, it relieves the tedium of droll, everyday existence. Laugh-out-loud funny in a “guilty pleasure” sort of way, this collection of strips and sketches has a real and unforced fluidity to it, even if it ultimately, in dry parlance, “goes nowhere.” A triumph of color, design…

Rendered in a combination of pen and graphite with exquisitely emotive precision, groundbreaking Chinese “alternative” cartoonist Yan Cong’s 2018 Paradise Systems release, Cry, is a sumptuous feast for the eyes, of that there is no doubt. But being that its brisk, economic narrative is primarily focused on immediate-post-break-up loneliness, what will surely surprise many is that it’s also a feast for the heart.

Not an easy one to consume, by any standard of measure, but one that lingers deliciously, that seeps in, its flavors revealing themselves over time as the work is allowed to stew, simmer, and be digested slowly. Yeah, I’m hungry as I write this — is it that obvious?

Ostensibly, this short-but-conceptually-dense book is about a guy, and a fairly typical-seeming one at that, who apparently does what a lot of typical guys do : takes his girlfriend for granted, doesn’t take time to understand her…

We last checked in with Jessica Campbell around these parts when her superb, topical, and hilarious graphic novel XTC69 rolled off the presses courtesy of Annie Koyama just over a year ago, but I’ve been meaning to do a write-up on some of her self-published minis ever since picking up a small batch of ’em at Autoptic back in August. A couple more came my way in the past few weeks and so, with her work once again reasonably fresh in my mind, it’s high time the esteemed Ms. Campbell got her due here at the Weekly Reading Round-Up. I shall procrastinate no further, this column has been a long time in coming.

Ten Most Incestuous Royals is, I believe, Campbell’s most recent release and collects a series of strips that originally saw the light of day on the Hyperallergic arts website. As both the cover and the title would…

Talk about an eye-opener!

To date, my only exposure to the work of Edie Fake has been via his Gaylord Phoenix comic, which certainly doesn’t fit anyone’s definition of “conventional,” but which nevertheless is structured, albeit perhaps tenuously, along standard-issue linear narrative lines.

Not so with the book under our metaphorical microscope here today, Little Stranger, a multi-faceted, deeply emotive collection of short-form strips published a few months ago by Secret Acres that presents work culled from  Fake’s own ‘zines self- published between 2002 and 2017. Simply put — and I say this with utmost respect — most of these strips are just plain weird. Delightfully so, in most cases, but you have to come into this book prepared to do some serious interpretive work yourself, as many of them discard with the concept of “narrative” altogether, and those that don’t adhere to it very loosely.

From the “Clowns”…

I’m not sue what it is about anthropomorphic animals and the LGBTQ+ comics community, but for the second time in less than a year, we’ve got a tandem of queer creators releasing a book of vignette-style stories centered on the broadly-defined “queer experience.” First out of the gate was Remy Boydell and Michelle Perez’ The Pervert from Image Comics, well-reviewed in most quarters (including this one) and focused on the hard-scrabble life of a trans protagonist subsisting on the economic margins, and in the next few weeks Czap Books will be releasing Little Teeth, drawn by Rory Frances and written by Jae Bearhat, that transposes the so-called “funny animal” trope into a queer communal living situation.

Beyond the more fluid sexual and gender identities and the tails and fur, though, it should be noted that the two books have very little in common, conceptually and tonally, and this points…

By any standard of measure, cartoonist L. Nichols’ recent Secret Acres-published comics memoir, Flocks, is a bit of a curious beast — for one thing, Nichols chooses to portray himself (or, earlier on, herself — I hope the pronoun is appropriate given his gender presentation at that point in life) as a stuffed doll, while everyone else is a standard human being. For another, he often communicates his internal thoughts, feelings, and self-perceptions by means of physics (or maybe they’re calculus? I dunno, I always sucked at both) equations. And for a third, the first several chapters essentially repeat a lot of the same information.

These things are all entirely explicable, of course — the first two, it should be said, are down to simple artistic choice, and while they took me some time to “get with,” I eventually found both to be “true” to the proceedings in terms…

Placing itself at the conceptual and philosophical intersection of comics and the works of art in other mediums (as well as the artists themselves) that inspire them, the quarterly “solo anthology” or “mini-monograph” series Ley Lines, a joint publication effort of Grindstone Comics and Czap Books, boasts a wider-than-it-sounds editorial remit, a “murderer’s row” of cartooning talent, and production values to match, each issue being approximately 1/3 (or so) the size of a standard comic book, riso-printed on high-quality paper with unique color schemes designed to match and, by extension, amplify the tone and tenor of the material on offer. Before the calendar flips yet again, I think it would behoove us to have a look back at the four installments of this remarkable title that came our way in 2018 —

Jia Sung’s Skin To Skin (Ley Lines #14) is visual and verbal poetry of the absolute…

It’s my understanding that among connoisseurs of the truly obscure and “outre,” Isabel Reidy’s 2012 self-published mini 1-800-Kravlox is considered something of a modern-day classic, and it’s not hard to see why : wearing its absurdity and outlandishness plain as day on its sleeve, it calls into question just about everything with its amorphous, energetic illustration and sparse, precise scripting — including, in a very real sense, its own aims, purposes, even reasons for being. It exists on its own, entirely self-created, terms and forces readers to either meet it on those terms or shrug their shoulders and walk away. That’s refreshing in and of itself, sure — but it’s also important.

Ostensibly a treatise on the nature of desire “starring” what must be, at the very least, an alien (perhaps even inter-dimensional, if not outright demonic) phone sex operator, it deliberately undercuts its own arguments — whatever…