Even by the low standards of licensed toy properties, the Go-Bots don’t get much respect. Yeah, sure, they’ve had some animation revivals (even, I think, a feature-length film or two of the straight-to-video variety) and some comic books here and there, but a lot of that — while no doubt making their diminished fan base happy —was probably more about keeping IP rights semi-active on the part of Hasbro. No billion-dollar live action blockbusters for these guys. What can you get from them that you can’t get from the Transformers, right?

Leave it to Tom Scioli, one of the most innovative and distinctive cartoonists working today, to give the best answer as to what makes the Go-Bots different from their more celebrated —- uhhmmm — peers : “The Go-Bots bleed,” Scioli tells us on this month’s IDW promotional blurb page. And if you need any more reason than that to…

There’s no adequate way to describe the contents of Canadian cartoonist/fine artist/musician Andrea Lukic’s latest Journal Of Smack (she self-publishes one of these every year or thereabouts) without reaching deep into the stores of one’s own vocabulary and dusting off any number of little-used gems grown atrophied and covered in cobwebs. I determined I was going to resist the urge to go down that road and concentrate on immediate, visceral impressions, but we’ll see how well I do holding to that vow. If you hear me using terms like “abstract singularity” or somesuch, you’ll know I failed.

And with that, it’s down to business —

Lukic’s book has all the aesthetics of a “found object,” its pages somewhat-unevenly glued within one of those cheap DIY quasi-“bindings,” and that’s as it should be : it looks and feels old, haphazard, random. Where does one find something like this? I dunno, but my…

This week, we take a brief side-step away from our usual small-press “turf” to have a quick look at four high-profile mainstream comics now available on your LCS shelves — three are alphas, one’s an omega.

The Green Lantern #1  marks DC’s latest attempt to revive the flagging critical and commercial fortunes of their premier cosmic super-hero, and while the sort of “back-to-basics” approach being undertaken by writer Grant Morrison and artist Liam Sharp may be precisely what the character needs (not having read a contemporary GL story is probably a couple of decades I’m really not in much position to judge), a dose of some sort of ambition would probably go a long way, and this book has precisely zero of that. It’s hard to believe that the same guy responsible for such thought-through and intricate mind-fucks as The Invisibles, The Filth, Flex Mentallo, and Nameless

The whole package — you probably know it when you see it.

So, let’s run this hypothetical by you, shall we? You encounter a book with lavish, surreal, jaw-dropping art, presented in full, rich, eye-popping color. It features 18 pages, and a 26-inch center foldout, all riso-printed on heavy-duty recycled paper. The cover boasts foil-press embossing and a die-cut “window,” and the binding is hand-stitched, complete with beads and bells in the upper corner. Would that sound like the proverbial “whole package” to you? It would to me.

And that’s precisely what Daria Tessler’s remarkable Accursed, released earlier this year by the modern masters of truly deluxe small-press publishing at Chicago’s own Perfectly Acceptable Press, is.

Still, it’s all for naught if the contents of said publication don’t manage to live up to — hell, don’t prove themselves worthy of — their magnificent presentation. Especially when the asking price…

The past is another country — except when it isn’t.

Noah Van Sciver has long been one of the undisputed modern masters of autobio comics, to the extent that even his most famous fictional character, Fante Bukowski (whose trilogy of books recently concluded with A Perfect Failure — reviewed a few weeks back on this very site) is obviously liberally populated with (admittedly exaggerated) people, places, and events from his own life — but a close look at one’s upbringing and how it continues to inform life right up to the present day, well, that’s quite a thematic evolution from, say, My Hot Date and similar works, is it not?

Which isn’t meant as a slight against his earlier, Ignatz-winning work, mind you — anything but! That comic more than earned its near-universal praise. But how the kid we met in its pages grew into the man we’ve seen in…

This week I was mightily impressed by comics both very familiar and anything but, and since I’m feeling slightly adventurous we’ll start with the “anything but” part of the equation —

Sufficiently intrigued by Philadelphia-based cartoonist George Wylesol’s mysterious, abstract, and multi-layered Avery Hill book Ghosts, Etc. last year to give a couple of his self-published minis a go (belatedly, I admit, but hey, I’ve been busy), 2017’s Porn stands out as the “must-buy” item of the two that I did, in fact, buy. Eight bucks is admittedly a bit spendy for what you get here in terms of physical product, but it more than carries its weight thematically, artistically, even philosophically. A series of disparate, perhaps even discarnate, drawings paired with coolly bland texts expounding upon vaguely harrowing scenarios with a disturbing level of clinical detachment, this is astonishingly confident stuff with an utterly unique point…

If you’ve been following the comics mainstream on social media (particularly Twitter and YouTube) at any point over the past year or two — particularly if “industry drama” is your thing — there’s no way you’ve been able to avoid at least a few passing references to a purported “movement” calling itself “comicsgate.” More than likely, you’ve picked up on the fact that there is plenty of controversy attendant with it, as well, but what it even is — well, that depends on who you ask.

While those who have little to no time for “comicsgate” view it as an inherently reactionary cesspool of retrograde social and aesthetic sensibilities complete with all the racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry you’d depressingly expect from such a, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” to those who have either aligned themselves with it or are sympathetic to its…

Who better than a multi-talented, groundbreaking, artistic visionary to provide the definitive analysis of — a multi-talented, groundbreaking, artistic visionary?

The answer is as obvious as the question itself, I suppose, and it’s for that reason that James Romberger’s just-released (by means of his own Ground Zero Books self-publishing imprint) Steranko : The Self-Created Man stands out immediately as the authoritative work on the art and legacy of its subject — the iconoclastic, in many respects enigmatic, Jim Steranko : carny escape artist, comics innovator, cinematic conceptualizer, frankly peerless genre-novel cover artist, trailblazing publisher, and raconteur par excellence.

Not that every aspect of the man whose own “real-life” exploits formed the basis of Jack Kirby’s legendary Mister Miracle character comes in for equal treatment in this slim, easily-digestible volume, mind you : this is a book makes no pretenses toward being an absolutely comprehensive biography, nor would such…

For more years than I care to admit, I was a compulsive moviegoer. I can kid myself and say it was all in pursuit of material for my Trash Film Guru blog (still a going concern, although now only updated a couple/few times a month as opposed to all the fucking time), but who do I think I’m fooling? The simple truth of the matter is that I was hooked on the entire experience of heading out to the theater, micro-analyzing whatever film I happened to be seeing, and then coming home and cranking out a review for the edification of whoever happened to be reading, as well as for myself. The bus or train ride home was where I’d get my thoughts together and begin to plan out both what I was going to say and how I was going to say it, and in time I began…