Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

Just about any and every artist that ever lived has been plagued with periods of self-doubt and creative bankruptcy, but the truly ingenious among them have found  ways to use those dark times as inspiration — after all, if you can’t rise above it, why not explore it for all…

  When you boil the art of cartooning down to its basic elements, you sometimes end up creating work that reminds people just why they love this medium so much in the first place — provided your sensibilities as an artist are sound to begin with, of course. When it…

    Apparently in the works for several years before its debut at CAB late last year (at least if the catalogue number attached to it by its publisher, Retrofit/Big Planet, is to be believed — and why wouldn’t it be?), it’s perhaps easier to define Andrew Lorenzi’s visionary graphic…

Some comics you hate. Some you’re indifferent to. Others you like. And then there are those, all too rare it seems, that you absolutely fall in love with. Let me introduce you to the latest object of my unbridled affection, David King’s Yellow Flag Intelligence Squadron #1.     Published under…

      There’s no better “relationship recharge” for a couple than getting away for a few days (at least) together — but that doesn’t mean a skilled cartoonist with a natural eye and ear for interpersonal dynamics can’t mine such an excursion for thematically-deep, if often subtle, pathos. And…

    As a follow-up to his breakthrough 2018 graphic novel The Winner, illustrator supreme Karl Stevens has chosen a curious project — a deliberate throwback to the “solo anthology” comics of the 1990s, his new (-ish, the first issue came out late last year) Kilgore series, Floppy, is both nostalgic…

  Comprehensive in scope and immersive in its presentation, Brooklyn’s finest comic shop, Desert Island, has done a bang-up job in putting together Wildest Dream, a compact little hardcover collection of Gary Panter’s sketchbook drawings from 1973 through 2018 printed (at the tail end of last year) in suitably garish…

    Understand that what I’m about to say is being applied to an imprint that’s published Greg Stump’s Disillusioned Illusions and Gerald Jablonski’s Farmer Ned’s Comics Barn, so yeah — when I “call out” Amy Lockhart’s Ditch Life as the weirdest comic to come out under the Fantagraphics Underground label? That’s no small…

    As near as I can tell, the events depicted in GG’s new book, Constantly (her last for Koyama Press and officially the first great comic bearing a 2020 copyright date) all take place within the confines of the apartment or house occupied by its nameless protagonist, but in a less literal…

    As we come to the end of another year, it’s time to survey the landscape and determine what the “best of the best” was. My only rule for inclusion on this list is that the book in question has to be an original work, not serialized in single…

          To the extent that I understand the term, a tulpa is an independent thoughtform created by a person that shares their brain but has thoughts, feelings, etc. of its own. Tibetan monks were — and may still be — big on these things, and David…

    There’s a lot of talk these days about comics as poetry (or at least more than there used to be), but E.A. Bethea’s ‘zine’s have been comfortably aligning themselves within that classification for a long time — even if they they don’t, in and of themselves, present literal poems…

    Single-panel comics are a tough game to make a go of it in — especially if you’re going for something more, or at least other, than a quick laugh — but in his second self-published collection of them, the just-released One Minute To Wonderland, Denver-based cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz…

So here’s the thing — I’ve reviewed this comic on this site already. But I haven’t reviewed this comic on this site already. I realize that demands an explanation, so by way of such: Casanova Frankenstein self-published a “rough cut” of the book that would later become Tad Martin #7…

    Where I come from, drugs were always considered to be pretty fun — and, for the record, I feel that if consumed responsibly they are — but who are we kidding? Kicking them can be a real motherfucker, and it’s not like the path of recovery isn’t perilous in its own…

    Over the course of the past few years, I’ve been of a mind that Simon Hanselmann should dump Megg, Mogg, Owl, and the rest of the gang and do something different. Move forward. Push himself to expand his horizons by letting go of the familiar. On a purely…

    Annie Koyama’s “farewell tour” wouldn’t be complete without one more release from Michael DeForge before Koyama Press closes up shop, and while his latest, Stunt, may not qualify as a “book” so much as a stretched-out (in terms of its page count and physical dimensions) Chick tract, it’s…

          For nearly two decades, celebrated comics auteur Charles Burns has been occasionally self-publishing a “secret” ‘zine that he gives away to — I dunno, a select few people in his “inner circle,” I suppose is the best way to define it. Friends, fellow cartoonists, for all…

  If there’s one cartoonist that learned scholars of the comics medium — and even the occasional opinionated asshole such as yours truly — wishes we could see more work from, it’s James Romberger. His understanding of the unique potential and possibilities inherent to sequential storytelling is on par with…

  A tidal wave of memories real and imagined, meticulously haphazard (here we go with the contradictions) pencil, pen, and brush strokes, kaleidoscopic colors, steam-of-consciousness observations, mixed genre tropes, and weighty foreboding, Josh Bayer’s latest Tinto Press-published comic/”graphic novel,” Theth: Tomorrow Forever, may be a sequel to its shorter-titled 2014 predecessor…

    There’s beauty in simplicity, as the cover of Tana Oshima‘s newest self-published mini, Nabokova, clearly demonstrates. It’s stark, perhaps even spartan, but deeply communicative and precisely thought through. It imparts its message with crystal clarity and nothing by way of fuss or muss. But there’s beauty in complexity, too, and…

      An instruction manual like no other, Chicago-based artist Lilli Carré’s Open Molar (#80 in the ongoing Mini Kus! line) is at times as utterly indecipherable as an Ikea assembly guide, but infinitely more interesting and, most crucially, rewarding. But what you come up with at the end is still…

  DEATH TRAP is a comic book concept that I’m confident will appeal to anybody who reads Daily Grindhouse. It’s written by Matt Miner (who wrote comics for GWAR, among many other cool things!) and drawn by Christopher Peterson, who was part of Dark Horse Comics’ GRINDHOUSE series, which is…

    We’ve all had ’em — those days when you go in to work and just feel like high-tailing it in the other direction, for reasons that are difficult to quantify as they are to ignore. Work — who the hell came up with this idea? Does anyone, on their…