Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

  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…

  As a critic — particularly a critic of “underground” and/or “avant-garde” comics — sometimes you’re called upon to attempt to describe the utterly indescribable. This is a good thing — at the very least it expands one’s vocabulary, sometimes even one’s consciousness — but it’s by no means an easy…

    Oblique connections are a recurring theme in Conor Stechschulte‘s ongoing Generous Bosom graphic novel series, but the disparate threads that run parallel to each other in that multi-faceted narrative appear to be heading for some sort of convergence as the sure-to-be-big finale approaches; in his latest self-published standalone…

    Ostensibly a sequel to her earlier, and justly well-received, The Song Of Aglaia, French cartoonist Anne Simon’s newly-released-in-English (and in color!) The Empress Cixtisis (originally published in 2014 under the title Cixtite Imperatrice) is something rather more than that, in actuality — I mean, yeah, Aglaia’s back and all, but she’s…

    There’s a sickness at the heart of what used to be called the “American Dream,” and we all know it : the consolidation of wealth among the so-called “one percent” has left a wide swath of devastation in its wake, entire regions of the country cast aside as…

    With his debut graphic novel, Bicycle Day, Brooklyn-based cartoonist and commercial illustrator Brian Blomerth has set for himself a fairly daunting challenge: Not just to illustrate, but to visually communicate, a historical “first.” And not just any historical “first” at that, but one that involved entering another state of consciousness altogether…

      Somewhere, at some point, for some reason, some people are building a city. Only maybe they’re not people, since at least one of them shambles about on all fours. And maybe it’s not a city because all they’ve got finished so far is part of a wall…

  It’s no secret that I’ve always considered Tom Van Deusen to be one of the funniest cartoonists working today — but that’s selling him a bit short, I suppose, considering that he’s also one of the most interesting. Hiding under the modern iteration of fairly classic comic-strip style illustration that…

      Billed by its creator and publisher, cartoonist Meghan Turbitt, as “the definitive guide to Star Wars by someone who has only seen the movies once for the first time last year,” the 2018 full-color mini Galactic Friends is pretty much exactly what it claims to be — which makes…

  There’s really so much to like about Belgian writer Zidrou and Dutch artist Aimee de Jongh’s Blossoms In Autumn, recently made available in a hardcover English translation from upstart UK small press powerhouse-in-the-making SelfMadeHero — the story of late-life romance between 59-year-old widower Ulysses, recently forced into early retirement from…

    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,”…