Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

    Yup, we’ve seen it before: the college/art school, or the post-college/post-art school, memoir has been a ubiquitous fixture of the “alternative” comics scene for three decades or so — more than enough time, in fact, for people who grew up reading these sorts of things to have kids…

    Suffused throughout with a light touch that can best be described as genuinely tender, Maia Kobabe’s Lion Forge-published Gender Queer: A Memoir comes across as anything other than the seismic shift it is in terms of consciousness-raising — and maybe that’s what makes it one in the first place. Eschewing…

    There’s a sense you get from page one of Nina Bunjevac’s new graphic novel Bezimena (presented in an oversized, lavish hardcover by publisher Fantagraphics) — the idea that this is no mere foray into the depraved mind of a sexually-charged psychopath. That there’s quite a bit more going on…

    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…

      There needs to be a new word in the English language for something less than a fixed and deliberate “event” and more than a random, happenstance “occurrence.” A middle ground of some sort that defines things that are happening, but are just — I dunno, happening. Cartoonist and musician Christopher…

    It’s time to just come right out and say it: Love And Rockets is the greatest series in comics history. It’s so consistently good, in fact, that it’s often taken for granted, a part of our lives that we just assume will always be there — because, for many…

      The connective tissue linking music and memory is very strong indeed — most of us can remember fairly clearly where we were and/or what we were doing the first time we heard a favorite song; hearing one we haven’t heard in years often takes us right back…

      Here’s the thing — most “indie” comics creators, and even most “indie” comics readers, fancy themselves as “outsiders,” to one degree or another. Not only do we work on, or take pleasure from, an art form that is on the “margins,” but one that is on the very…

  Somewhere on a colorful and computer-generated plane of existence, a semblance of “life” trudges along, oddly familiar in both tone and content to the world we know: the denizens navigate their way through a media-saturated landscape, waste too much time on the internet, immerse themselves in various fan “communities,”…

       I’m not sure what it is about “Bible comics,” but there’s something appealing about the whole notion, even to a devout non-believer such as myself. Whether it’s the fire and brimstone of a Jack T. Chick or the scaled-down intimacy of a Chester Brown, I’m down for…

    James Sturm is an important cartoonist. Why, just ask around — everybody says so. He founded CCS. He gives TED Talks. His work is parsed over in minute detail in the pages of academic journals. Those rare occasions when he releases new material are heralded as “major” publishing…

Can it be? Or should that read “can it bee”? It seems impossible that Mary Fleener’s new Fantagraphics-published hardcover book, Billie The Bee, could be her first proper “graphic novel,” and yet — that’s precisely the case. It took me a minute to wrap my head around that fact, as I’ve…

    The generally-held view of the ancient mystical pseudo-scientific practice of alchemy is that it was all about turning lead into gold, but my understanding is that this is a rather limited “piece” of the overall alchemical project, which was largely concerned with creating that which didn’t exist before…

    Nothing constrains Eric Kostiuk Williams. His cartooning is never less than near-infinitely adapatable, fluid, mercurial — maybe literally, as his forms, figures, even structures seem liquid at room temperature, ever in a state of joyous flux, refusing to define themselves and embracing the joyous possibilities of being whatever their…

      If there’s one thing I hate, it’s “YouTube stars.” The idea that sub-moronic loudmouths such as Pewdiepie and Logan Paul have made small (or maybe not-so-small) fortunes by broadcasting a whole lotta nothing from their living rooms makes even the most vacuous “famous for being famous” celebrities, such…

      As I write this review, “president” Donald Trump is pathetically scrambling to legitimize his inherently illegitimate so-called “state of emergency” along the US-Mexico border, a stunt undertaken in order to commandeer funds for his pipe-dream of a “wall” by executive fiat. A genuine “emergency” has been unfolding,…

  Man, it’s been awhile. Not as long a while as the gap — no, make that gulf — between Casanova Frankenstein’s The Adventures Of Tad Martin #5 and The Adventures Of Tad Martin #sicksicksix, a book that was literally a couple of decades in the making, but still — four or five years, by…

  In point of fact, this is probably the sort of comic that I’m predisposed to dislike: It’s not just that I don’t give much of a shit about G.I. Joe and didn’t even when I was at the age where I was supposed to, it’s that exercises soaked in nostalgia don’t…

    And so the first (arguably) “major” release of 2019 in the “alternative” comics world is upon us — never mind that Charles Forsman and Max de Radigues’ Hobo Mom is actually about five years old and is just now being released in an English-language version, publisher Fantagraphics Books is…

    Growing up is hard, whoever you are — but odds are that no matter how hard your adolescent years were, they weren’t as hard as Pearl’s. Or should that be Ancco’s?   Precisely how autobiographical Bad Friends is seems to be a bit of an open question — the book (originally…

  I. I have a recurring dream about a house. My house, to be specific, but not really: There are extra rooms I’ve never seen before, large walk-in closets that my wife and I both wish we had but don’t, cavernous storage spaces with nothing in them — hell, one…

    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…

      What will the future hold? What changes, subtle or otherwise, will it usher in? How will it alter the essential character of our lives? And, perhaps most importantly — what will it look like? Yumi Sakugawa has thought about these questions thoroughly, deeply. She’s considered how the past,…

    More quiet than a whisper, louder than a thunderclap, Alyssa Berg’s riso-printed comics collection Recollection seeps into the mind through the eyes, heart, and subconscious simultaneously, bypassing entirely the gatekeeping functions of the rational mind in favor of something deeper, more profound, more fundamentally true. It never ceases to amaze,…