Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

    When you can construct a fully-formed, emotionally resonant, deeply poignant comics memoir in just 40 pages, you’re probably an extraordinary cartoonist. When you can do it in 40 panels? Then take a well-deserved bow, because you’re downright otherworldly. Now, before you mention it, rest assured that I’m fully aware that it’s…

    My dating experience entirely pre-dates the “Tinder Era,” a fact for which I’m eternally grateful — and who wouldn’t be? After all, as embarrassing as it may be for many people of my generation to confess to their offspring that that they met their other parent at a…

If you’re going to San Francisco — Fuck the “flowers in your hair” stuff and forget the “gentle people” — you’d do better to keep an eye out for the speed freaks, junkies, pickpockets, gutter-dwelling lowlifes, psychotic serial killers, devil-worshipers, and predators of every stripe. The Mamas And The Papas…

    We’ve all been there — dead-end job, dead-end love life, dead-end existence. In his previous autobiographical minis, Chicago-based cartoonist Mike Freiheit has dwelt on these issues in exacting (and often hilarious) detail, but in his longest work to date, the impressive and ambitious graphic novel (parts of which…

      Not to sound too dramatic — or maybe that should be melodramatic — right out of the gate, but it strikes me that any way you look at it, the much-vaunted “age of reason” is over.   Oh, sure, social and political commentators have been telling us at least…

    It goes without saying that whenever somebody reasonably well-known from another field of creative endeavor entirely “makes the leap” over to comics, a certain hardened, crusty rump of fandom will view said transition (however temporary) with suspicion. Less so, I’m guessing, when it’s a literary personage like, I…

      Toward the tail end of 2017 — yeah, I know, I’m still playing a little bit of “catch-up” here and there, sue me — the always-interesting Retrofit Comics/Big Planet Comics publishing co-venture released one of the more thoroughly engrossing books of the year, cartoonist/painter Tara Booth’s How To…

      “In a town like Twin Peaks,” the promotional advertisements for David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME informed us, “no one is innocent.” Of course, when his foolishly-lambasted masterpiece (for my money, at any rate) hit theaters back in 1992, Lynch had already made something of a career…

    Where the “average” wordless comic often comes across as the result of a choice made by the cartoonist to communicate her or his story by means of the purely visual “half” of the medium, Lale Westvind’s 2018-released Grip (specifically, Grip Vol. 1, as this is the 68-page opening installment of…

    Like love itself, there is a poetry and beauty to Swedish cartoonist Anneli Furmark’s 2018 graphic novel Red Winter (the first of her works to be translated into English, courtesy of its North American publisher, Drawn+Quarterly) — but it’s often understated, unobtrusive, a “part of the scenery,” if you…

  Some comics really make you work. Not as hard as the cartoonist who made them, of course — and Austin English busted his tail (and his hands, and probably even his brain) on his latest solo book, The Enemy From Within, published in late 2017 by Sonatina Comics. The sheer effort that…

  Chances are that it would be almost unbearably pretentious, not to mention way less clever than it sounds, if I were to refer to Alex Degen’s latest Koyama Press-published graphic novel, Soft X-Ray/Mindhunters — which originally began “life” as a 44-page comic and now stands, expanded and extrapolated upon, at a…

  Namelessness. Anonymity. Invisibility. For the protagonist in Jerome Ruillier’s new Drawn+Quarterly-published graphic novel, The Strange, these three things are inextricably linked — and while all of them are, to one degree or another, imposed upon him by society and circumstance, the first two are undeniably de-humanizing (even if, fair enough,…

  There’s no doubt about it: “funny animal” comics aren’t what they used to be. Then again, they never really were, at least not the good ones — one way or another, they were always at least a little bit subversive, and whether we’re talking about Walt Kelly’s open socio-political commentary in Pogo…

    Okay, here’s the deal: I had this whole thing done — and probably done better — and I scrapped it. This now-meager memorial to the inimitable, irreplaceable Steve Ditko — artist, creator, visionary, iconoclast — initially had a soaring, elegiac title, was loaded with florid and heartfelt prose, and…

    Here’s the thing: Jim Woodring’s been at it so long, and done it so well, that it’s almost easy to — dare I say it — take him for granted. There’s really no reason that you (or I, or we) should, though — after all, the guy is…

    Powerful roles in diverse exploitation projects helped ensure the luminous Sybil Danning (BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, HERCULES, HOWLING II, REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS) a place as the cinematic prototype of a woman who could kick ass…and look good while doing it. Danning has even mentioned in interviews that Ericka,…

        There’s no doubt about it: The post-apocalyptic world isn’t what it used to be. Somewhere, somehow, we swapped out THE ROAD WARRIOR for THE ROAD, and the whole idea of living in an irradiated wasteland, well — it started looking like a lot less fun. Which,…

The Chicago-based Cinepocalypse Film Festival has hit its stride this year, hosting a great number of world and midwest premieres rivaling those of Fantasia or Fantastic Fest.  In addition to the premieres, however, the festival has also been the home of several revival screenings, featuring rare theatrical showings of such…

    We live not just in turbulent times, but significant ones — the ground has shifted beneath our feet, and if you’re American, it’s fair to say that, in many respects, the facade of the country we thought we knew has slipped, and in its place stands revealed a nation that…

      I think it’s fair to say that 2017 was a “break-out year” for New York-based cartoonist Katie Skelly, what with her OGN My Pretty Vampire ranking among the year’s best-reviewed books and proving to be an out-of-left-field success for its publisher, Fantagraphics, so it doesn’t come as any surprise…

    I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m way less familiar with the current state of affairs vis-a-vis all-ages comics than a person in my position probably should be. It’s not that I have anything against all-ages books, quite the contrary: I think there needs to be a…

  By now you’re well-familiar (or should be) with the laundry-list of societal problems that have “trickled down” into all forms of media, including comics, and also know that right near the top of said list is misogyny, which many of us fooled ourselves into thinking was on the way out…

      The work of cartoonist Laura Lannes is as raw as it gets. Rendered in tightly-framed watercolors that leave plenty of negative space for readers to fill in the “blanks” (both physical and metaphorical) for themselves, her 2dcloud-published graphic memoir By Monday I’ll Be Floating In The Hudson With…