Supermag
By Jim Rugg
Adhouse Books

Man, Jim Rugg is so good. Supermag plays out like a collection of some hot new comics talents, until you realize that they’re all drawn by the same immensely talented individual. As with Afrodisiac, Rugg gets some help on the writing side, but the cartoonist’s breadth and competency of style is pretty intimidating, from the page of Vanilla Ice trading cards, to Duke Armstrong, the world’s mightiest golfer, who blows up a plane while scaling a cliff with a pair of clubs. Rugg distills erratic pop cultural juxtaposition into extremely enjoyable and crazily stylistic chunks. Ten bucks is a lot to pay for a floppy, sure, but can you really put a price tag on the continuing adventures of patriotic primate US Ape? Don’t let the terrorists win.

You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack
By Tom Gauld
Drawn & Quartely

What can I tell you that Mark didn’t already cover in his review? Not a ton, probably, so I’ll just pile on the praise. Tom Gauld is great. We all loved Goliath, right? Oozing sublime charm out of its minimalist line work. Add to that some extreme literary smarts and distill it into a single panel strip and you’ve got the makings of an entry in this collection of Guardian strips. We’re talking actual funny smarts here, by the way -- not just the sort of knowing chuckle you too often get from learned comedy. Sure it helps to have read a book or two to get a number of these jokes, but Gauld’s humor is far more hearty than a winking reference.

Also, I’m thinking of writing him a letter to inquire about pricing on the “Street Tom Waits Grew Up On” strip, so I can hang it on the wall and invite people over to my apartment stare at it in wonder. Seems as good a way to spend a Thursday night as any.

Eye of the Majestic Creature #2
By Leslie Stein
Fantagraphics

I want to live in a world where Leslie Stein goes home to a chain-smoking, anthropomorphic guitar. There’s a strangely friendly comfort to be had here, once you’ve navigated your way around the strange jolt of her universe’s internal logic, where the occasional individual can walk the streets with a flower for a head, largely undetected. There’s a seriousness in these pages, in amongst the cartoon imagery, but Stein navigates heaviness with a grace, as in the trip to a parent’s NarcAnon meeting, with attendee intros juxtaposed with pages from her learn-to-draw book. It’s a sort of childlike forgiveness of life’s darker corners, which carries on into grown up stories, as in the opening story of a retail existence with narration borrowed from the early pages of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.

Stein’s is a welcomingly unique take on the well-trod world of autobiographical comics, and once you’ve excepted her rhythms as your own, it can be a hard world to step away from.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen
By Lucy Knisley
First Second

If you find a more delightful book than Relish this year, please let me know. I’ll say right now that the odds are pretty slim. Lucy Knisley shuffled together a memoir and a cookbook into a cohesive collection of short stories that illustrate her life in food, the product of two parents who seared food obsessions into her DNA. The highlight has to be the tale of adolescent rebellion colored with pink hair and Lucky Charms -- a processed food defiance against epicurean parents. Can’t say I actually went so far as cooking any of the recipes contained here -- after five years in this apartment, I’m not entirely sure my pre-war oven even works -- but the tale of traveling to Mexico with a best friend who’s forced to leave a $200 stash of adult magazines behind a airport toilet, that stuff’s universal.

My Dirty Dumb Eyes
By Lisa Hanawalt
Drawn & Quarterly

I don’t know whether it’s Lisa or her publishers who deserve a dressing down for not running with the suggested title What We Draw About When We Draw About Sex Bugs, but after reading that in the hilarious fine print of the book’s penultimate page, I just can’t say I’m so into My Dirty Dumb Eyes as a name. But that’s really my chief complaint here. Hanawalt’s one of the funniest people going in comics these days, and just about every story in this collection is a testament to that fact. Heck, she’s even managed to tame the boiling hatred for lists that this post-McSweeney’s internet world has instilled in me. And I’m not sure what the standalone painting of Superman and Wolverine holding hands is doing in here, but it’s seriously making me consider getting a first tattoo.

Side note: I mentioned to someone at D&Q that I was planning on taking the book with me on a trip as sub-10,000 feet reading, and was helpfully discouraged from reading it around small children, so I figure I’d pass that life lesson along. Whatever you do, don’t let this thing with 100 yards of a school -- unless you’re eager to teach some impressionable young minds where dick lizards really come from.

Very Casual
By Michael DeForge
Koyama Press

Speaking of exercises in public health, here’s a thing that probably shouldn’t be read by anyone -- or at least not those prone to nausea and dramatic fainting. Michael DeForge’s work exists in a universe where the creative overlap between William Burroughs and David Cronenberg is the biological fabric of the universe. You know the drill, parasitic worm deer, psychedelic snowman meat slices. It’s a world where amorphous monster blob indie rock bands are the norm. Also, Aunt May and Dr. Octopus are deeply in love, much to Spider-man’s chagrin. Very Casual is always fascinating, mostly grotesque and in the case of the biker gang with cartoon character helmets, actually pretty touch in the end.

Everything Together
By Sammy Harkham
Picturebox

I find myself looking for big takeaways here, but Sammy Harkham seems to find most of his stories -- and humor -- in the void. Like Poor Sailor, about halfway through the book, which closes on a panel of a one-armed man building a house next to the grave of a wife he abandoned for adventures at sea. Okay, well, maybe the takeaway there is “don’t abandon your wife for adventures at sea.” But still, the cartoonist is far more interested in meditations than resolution -- but even devoid of greater surface meaning, Everything Together is chock full of poignance and uncomfortable hilarity. And bonus: there’s also cartoons about Frank Santoro’s father and Dan Clowes’ dog eating Kevin Huizenga’s hand. Where else are you gonna get that?

From "Everything Together"

Other Stuff By Peter Bagge. Fantagraphics

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for this one -- well before Fantagraphics ever announced the thing, and certainly Other Stuff doesn’t disappoint. In fact, the mere bringing together of Bagge’s Murry Wilson strips is worth the price of entrance alone. In fact, Peter and assorted Fantagraphics employees, if you’re reading this (as I suspect some of you are), I will be the first in line to buy a graphic novel-length biography of the Wilson family patriarch and self-appointed musical genius drawn in Bagge’s signature style. Ditto for the assorted liberty taking rock and roll tales of folks like Sinatra and Sly Stone.

And then there are the collaborations with R. Crumb, Alan Moore, Dan Clowes and the like, many of which I already own in some form or other, though my self-diagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder thanks Bagge’s publishers for collecting them all into on handy volume. It’s great to see all of this stuff together, particular those Hate b-stories that fell through the cracks of Fanta’s excellent “Buddy Does...” collections. Like we really needed another testament to Peter Bagge’s greatness.

Letting It Go By Miriam Katin. Drawn & Quarterly

I had the strange experience of running into Art Spiegelman on the streets of Cologne, Germany over the summer. Strange because we were there for very different reasons, and I’d had no idea what brought the cartoonist to the outdoor mini-mall built around a centuries old church that is Cologne. Stranger still was the experience of seeing him speak at a local museum upon his invitation, monitoring how the audience reacted to the artist’s “holocaust denial” cartoons. And while I’d certainly never dream of equating experience as a Jew born in America toward the end of the 20th century to those of Katin, an artist born in Hungary during the second World War, I’ve some small sense of appreciation for the baggage we bring to our own concepts of modern Germany.

As its name poetically implies, Letting Go is an attempt to release some of that, an act she understandably flatly refuses on hearing her sons decision to move to Berlin. Katin illustrates life after that decision in color pencil sketches, telling the tale of daily minutia, reflection and the occasional flashback, all well aware that, for better and worse, lifelong opinions rarely change overnight.

Reich #9 By Elijah Brubaker. Sparkplug

I’m sad to say that I fell off a bit with Reich. While I commend Brubaker’s commitment to the floppy (and Sparkplug’s commitment to issuing his efforts), the publication schedule hasn’t made it particularly easy to keep up. It’s worth the effort, of course. The cartoonist has taken on the life of one of the most interesting figures in psychoanalysis, holding little back in the process. This ninth issue finds the Freud protege entering the final decade of his life, at odds with peer, journalists and the government thanks to radical, metaphysical beliefs.

Brubaker has no interest in catching you up, though a quick visit to Wikipedia should do the trick, though, really, it would be silly not to just start from the beginning -- the cartoonist’s vaguely cubist style does some wonderful things with Reich’s mad science fashion sense. And while I’ve been hassling both the artist and his publisher to put out a collection for a few years now (I suspect the last 10 years of the analyst’s comics life will have to play out first), let’s embrace the dying art of the paper serial while it’s still with us.

The Frantastic Four By Sam Spina. Kilgore

I pulled this (if memory serves) of the shelf of the wonderful Needles and Pens on a recentish trip to San Francisco, not at all expecting the tale of alien encounters to climax with a break dancing competition. Needless to say, it was a pleasant surprise. The art has a sketchily cartoony, Graham Annable-esque feel to it, and the story would fit nicely in amongst that new brand of quirky Cartoon Network daytime programming that always seems to be on when I check into hotels these days. Needless to say, I hope it’s not the last we’ll be seeing of the celery monster and his ilk.

Susceptible, by Genevieve Castree. Drawn & Quarterly

“As I get older, I meet other children who have a missing father who lives in British Columbia. It’s like a mythical kingdom where dads go to disappear.” Genevieve Castree’s got a knack for knocking you flat on your ass every so often, channeling the sort of profundity that comes with the innocence of youth. It’s the story of a young woman grappling to define what shaped her -- a hard mystery to unravel, really, in a youth shaped by the influences of adult children too hung up on their own neuroses to help a young mind from developing its own.

There’s an intimacy, too, to Castree’s art -- flat with distinctively handwritten dialog, owing a lot, it seems to fellow Québécois cartoonist Julie Doucet and the zine culture from which she sprang. But for all the reality, the artist isn’t afraid to dive into the metaphorical, when it comes time to drive a point home, particularly in those moments that chronicle her initially hesitant, but her initially hesitant embrace of drug culture and punk rock -- less tools of rebellion than means of escape.

But there’s something of a happy ending in here in the knowledge that if we can’t erase the damage done, as least some of us will be lucky enough to outgrow it.

Bicycle, by Ugo Gattoni. No Brow Press

The decision between hanging it on the wall or filing on the bookshelf is generally put to rest rather quickly by the binding. No Brow Press hasn’t made things easy here with Bicycle, printed as a leporello foldout couched inside a book jacket. The foldout is “nearly two meters in length,” which, through the miracle of two-sided printing, puts at around four meters of highly detailed chaos, a bicycle race through vaguely distopian cartoon streets apparently inspired by the 2012 London Olympics.

There’s plenty here to keep you busy for a few days, until you finally come to a decision on how precisely to present the thing, filled with some rather blue shenanigans, Escher-esque physics and, I suspect, inside jokes that I will never be able to unravel. I’m also not entirely sure who won the race, but judging from the state of the cityscape, the contestants and spectators clearly have more important things to worry about.

Barrel of Monkeys, by Florent Rupert and Jerome Mulot. Rebus Books

There’s a Dash Shaw quote on the rear that perfectly sums up the feeling here. The cartoonist, hardly proficient in French, describes the experience of reading the book without and without comprehension of the dialogue. The images, while oft graphic, don’t really give one an idea precisely how twisted its contents are -- nor, more importantly, do they reveal just how funny the book’s sketchy drawings and phenakistoscope storytelling can be.

Nowhere is that juxtaposition better pronounced than in the narration of a trip to the zoo by the two cameramen leads. And while I’d long ago assumed I was finished feeling bad for laughing, having such sensibilities dulled by the likes of Johnny Ryan and Ivan Brunetti, Ruppert and Mulot have, for better or worse, reawakened some of those doubts. But hey, we were all bound to find out what terrible people we are sooner or latter right? At least we’ve got the occasion to laugh about it.

Ablatio Penis, by Will Dinski. 2D Cloud

I admit, I picked this one off the shelf at Forbidden Planet due to the intrigue of an unmarked, brightly-colored comic. A fan of past Dinski minis, I didn’t bother going so far as attempting to figure out what the thing is called -- something the cartoonist doesn’t exactly broadcast even inside the book. Sitting down to write this, having just finished the thing, I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not to reveal the name here -- no some much due to the raciness of severed genitals as the fact that there was an extra level of enjoyment in reading with such casual ignorance.

I apologize for spoiling some of the surprise. It’s a necessary evil. I want you to pick up this book, and having a name to awkwardly mutter to the proprietary of your local comic bookery should help in that pursuit. Ablatio Penis is a rare look at the American political system that never comes across an attempt at a teaching moment. There are truths to be found in here about the flaws of our electoral system -- underhanded acts and making the public personal, but the book never preaches against them with any particular, just delivers matter of factly the sort of fallout that has become as much a part of the system as the laws drawn up to define it.

See previous Comics Rack reviews

Don't Go Where I Can't Follow by Anders Nilsen (with Cheryl Weaver). Drawn & Quarterly

I usually know more about these titles from bigger name cartoonists going into them. I can't say whether the element of surprise was a good thing for Anders Nilsen's latest. A swift change from the epic mini Big Questions, which was loving compiled into a massive volume by D&Q roughly a year and a half back. Don't Go Where I Can't Follow is a swift emotional kick the the chest, that will make you bawl your eyes out to the point of dehydration or immediately phone up a loved one who hasn't received the sort of attention they deserve. Or, more probably both.

There are photographs here and love notes and sketches and comics contained herein. It's a hard thing to read, a great deal of whose difficulty comes, ultimately, in knowing just how impossible it must have been to write.

Eat More Bikes by Nathan Bulmer. Koyama Press

This might be the perfect comic for the internet age -- one-liners built into six-panel strips, crafted with sketchy artwork. Like 140 character Twitter jokes understood to be scripts for full-page comics. Sure, 30 seconds more attention span required for consumption, but, you know, pictures. On occasion, Nathan Bulmer even has the audacity to ask us to sit through a full two page spread, but don't worry too much, he'll, more often than not, spend the final panel tearing it all down, as is perhaps demonstrated with one of the best single issue comics openings in recent memory, The Noseless Great Moral Cats, a false start intended to trick parents into buying this sick funny stuff, a page after a crown of thorn-wearing Jesus is busily bleeding on a baby lamb.

Ticket Stub by Tim Hensley. Yam Books

I'd by lying if I said I didn't have to do a bit of online research, to make sure this was the same Tim Hensely -- you know, the one who gave us the Archie-in-depted adventures of umpteen millionaire teenage playboy Wally Gropius. Same guy, it turns out (and not the Blue Chair Records Americana recording artists with slightly better SEO). Ticket Stub culls the nine issue run of Hensley's 90s mini of the same, drawn during the cartoonist's time as a close-captioned writer. The pages are filled with drawn stills from a diverse array of films, sketched as stories in their own right and retaining all the strangeness of a truly odd job indeed.

Sell Your Boobs by Lisa Hanawalt

If it weren't for people like Johnny Ryan, Ivan Brunetti and Ken Dahl, I might not know what a truly, truly terrible person I am. Lisa Hanawalt is in that rare company -- cartoonist who can make me laugh out loud uncomfortable on a crowded train. Sure she's all fancy now, hanging out at those fancy New York Times illustrator parties, but she still throws us horrible human beings some bones, like the mini Sell Your Boobs, a little yellow-paged sketchbook full of gags I'd genuinely feel bad about myself describing to you here.

There are no animals wearing typewriter hats, but plenty of the lists we've grown to love and some earnest, but contextually hilarious life drawing, as well as a few pages that wonderfully appear to have been drawn using a crayon with the wrong hand. And, of course, the obligatory page of horse drawings. Sell Your Boobs is a small and light thing, but it's a helpful assurance that all those fancy pants newspaper parties haven't robbed her of her ability to make the rest of us feel bad for guffawing around small children.

Kicksville Confidential #1 by Avi Spivak

Anyone with a bias toward the world of wonderful things will almost certainly feel compelled to pay a visit to the Norton Records website, credit card in hand, upon finishing Kicksville Confidential. And there, you’ll be greeted with a devastating little video about the vintage label, which was slammed full force by Hurricane Sandy, doing a number on its catalog stock. Norton’s a beacon of raw cultural salvation in a river of pop ephemera and this is precisely the book it deserves, a sequential catalog of its history and the legendary and often hilarious quirks of its roster of artists.

Billy Miller (who founded the company with one-time Cramps drummer Miriam Linna) kicks off the book with a tale of the label’s founding, writing, “Norton’s got a six-and-a-half foot cyclops drag queen, a pair of singing siamese twins joined at the top of the head, an indian with one lung, at least three murders, the nation’s number one art thief” -- and it just sort goes on from there, setting the stage for the truly insane tales of hillbilly chicken enthusiast Hasil Adkins, label mascot Esquerita and lunatic rock guru Kim Fowley, amongst dozens of other rock ‘n roll inmates.

Fanny & Romeo by Yves Pelletier and Pascal Girard. Conundrum Press

Even with a few Drawn & Quarterly books to his name, Pascal Girard isn’t a household name in American indie comics circles (those living in homes with spinner racks of their very own) -- quite the shame in light of last year’s Reunion, a delightful look at the rituals surrounding attempts to go home again. Fanny & Romeo, a translation of 2010’s Valentin, finds the French-Canadian cartoonist teaming up with comedian Yves Pelletier for heartfelt look at the intersection of adult relationships, animal ownership and allergies. The story’s not always pretty, but Girard’s Schulzian watercolored images usually are.

John Porcellino (who recently released a new issue of King Cat that you should probably buy) handed me a copy of this collection adding, proudly, that John G. Miller inked all of the blacks with a ballpoint pen. That’s a lot. Each panel in this book is about half black ink. Maybe that gives you some idea of what you’re in for here -- but probably not. Few things can, except to say, perhaps, that this is something akin to what you might get, were Fletcher Hanks obsessed with cyberpunk and rough black and white shapes. Oh and there are nazis and spaceships and the devil and characters named Slasher McSpace (the meanest hippy in town) and Baby Richard Dingball (the baby fugitive).

I read this on a plane and the lady next to me looked at me like I was crazy. She’s got a point, but I’m still going to run out and buy the other collections of Miller’s work. Assuming my head doesn’t explode first.

I can’t be the only one who thought of Katie Skelly’s Nurse Nurse (as seen in this very column a few months back) the first time I picked up this mini, right? Like that book, it’s something of a minimalist psychedelic space story (aren’t they all?), but that’s really where the comparisons stop. Philippa Rice’s brave other words aren’t so much the backdrop of strange adventure stories as they are the settings for run-of-the-mill texts between a man and a woman who ran into each other in the stairwell of an apartment building. That’s right -- relationship problems! In space!

Stocking stuffers? We thought about it, but in spite of what laundromat radio stations might lead you to believe, it IS too early to start thinking about the holidays. And besides, Chris Ware, for one, has clearly gone out of way to only produce work that could never in a million years be stuffed into anything resembling a stocking. So we guess you'll just have to keep these ones all to yourself. Don't say you've never done anything nice for you.

Building Stories by Chris Ware. Pantheon

Part way through the “14 distinctively discrete books, booklets, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets,” you wonder why you started reading, because you already knew that Chris Ware cuts like a knife deep into the heart of modern human isolation. And every few pages or so, like clockwork, something makes contact and utterly destroys you all over again. All that coupled with the knowledge that, try as you might, you’ll never be capable of producing something of this magnitude -- Ware is just one of those sorts of outliers who makes everyone else toiling away in a given medium feel that much worse about their own limited set of tools.

But as ever, it’s a beautiful journey, painstaking detailed and mind-numbingly crafted, without a single errant line, because we all know that a perfectionist like Ware would never be able to live with such an abhorrent thing. Thankfully, the cartoonist is fully capable of creating near perfect things, works of art that some how feel underpriced at $50 a pop.

Heads Or Tails by Lilli Carré. Fantagraphics Books

Until now, I probably would have sent you toward a copy of the Lagoon or Woodsman Pete, had you asked me where to start with Lilli Carré. Of course, both of those are still perfectly acceptable starting points (and really, start anywhere for that matter), but this collection of five years worth of Carré’s work certainly offers up the most diverse single serving of the whimsical cartoonist’s catalog thus far, both from an aesthetic and storytelling standpoint. These strips, which originally in the pages of places like The Believer and Mome, find the artist dipping her toes into new pools, the sort of freedom afforded by the low commitments of the short story form, often to truly wonderful effect.

Start with the paralleled remembrances of Rainbow Moment, and then work back and then forward, so you can read it again. You probably didn’t miss anything the first time around, but you should probably make sure, just in case.

Popeye by Roger Langridge and Tom Neely. IDW

I’ve entertained fantasies about a Tom Neely-drawn Popeye since the day I first saw the pages of The Blot unfold like some heavy metal EC Segar fever dream. And certainly one couldn’t ask for a better partner in crime than Roger Langridge, the Fred the Clown creating cartoonist who’s done time on a slew of properties, ranging from the Muppets to Thor. Issue #3 presents a particular highlight, as Thimble Theater’s famous sailor sets out to train Wimpy for an upcoming boxing match. Pelicans are eaten, Blutos are knocked unconscious and training montages worthy of Joe 'Bean' Esposito's silky vocals ensue. The sweet science indeed. It’s kid-friendly enough to help turn the next generation on to the greatest forearms in comics, but fans of Neely’s more horror-minded work will find some familiar costume choices in Wimpy’s undertaker-hooded opponent. Everybody wins! (Except for those foolish enough to do battle with Popeye, of course.)

Diary Comics #4 by Dustin Harbin. Koyama Press

I started to think that maybe the best diary strips are those done by non-professional cartoonists -- and there’s probably something to be said for that. Let’s face it, there’s lots of overlap, 1,000 different cartoonists all writing about the same weekend at the same independent comics expo -- sort of an emo Rashomon told through infinite crosshatching. Perhaps its the fact that my own circumstances have forced me to step away from the belly of the comics convention beast, but the latest collection of Dustin Harbin’s strip has offered up a subtle reminder of something I’d perhaps forgotten -- that subject matter is, at best, incidental, when a diary strip is done.

The best examples aren’t afraid of the mundane -- and certainly Harbin isn’t. Though, if his strip finds him floating through space with Albert Einstein every so often, you can’t really blame the guy.

New York Drawings by Adrian Tomine. Drawn & Quarterly

There have been all of, what, three issues of Optic Nerve published in the past decade? Adrian Tomine, you’re given those of us in the indie comics trenches some serious abandonment issues here -- those of us who cite the series along with Eightball and Hate and Love & Rockets as the books that helped up our eyes to the potential of this medium in high school and college. Oh, we know why you haven’t been around a lot. We get it it. We live in a world where making a living as a cartoonist is a tricky proposition even for someone whose convention lines wrap around to the other side of the room. And yeah, if we thought for a minute that The New Yorker wanted what we were selling, we’d drop everything in an instant -- and once they did, tales about angsty 20-year-olds might not have the same resonance.

But then you open this collection and realize Tomine is still Tomine. That the sequential floppies have mostly morphed into single-page illustrations (which, wild guess, likely pay orders of magnitude more than full issues ever did), but the cartoonist has used this opportunity to condense short stories into single panel tales. Yeah, some of the content is likely just commissioned supplementals for others’ text stories that do most of the heavy lifting, but divorced of text, Tomine has become a master of conveying real world complexities in the context of a single frame. And as you stare and search, the book store is changed from a stationary object for coffee tables and dusty bookshelves into something more vibrant -- not quite a graphic novel per se, but a portrait, certainly, of the world around him.

The Infinite Wait and Other Stories by Julia Wertz. Koyama Press

There’s a disclaimer disguised as a “fun fact” at the beginning of this collection, explaining away the title as a spoof of those abstract, self-important “New York literary elite” novels. And while anyone familiar with Wertz’s work can happily tell you that taking herself too seriously has never been a cause for concern, The Infinite Wait certainly marks a shift in focus for the cartoonist’s work. Wertz is still mining her only life for material, as she did on her long-standing web strip The Fart Party (yes, she’s acknowledge many times over that she’s not great at naming things), but the move from single paged joke strips to the short story format has afforded the cartoonist a different approach.

This means two immediate things: first, it’s not as funny as often as her older work and second, it’s a lot more real. Yes, there’s all kinds of wisdom in those infinite adages about truth in humor, but dissecting the world into beats over the course of a weekly strip has the tendency to erode nuance from memory, facts and thoughts rearranged in service of punchlines. There are tales of tackling the chronic disease and regretful drinking that defined much her 20s spent in San Francisco and New York.

But don’t let such earnestness dissuade you, coming off the joke-centric world of Wertz’s work thus far -- there are other topics, too, that lend themselves a bit better to the cartoonist’s snark, like crazy parents and a factotum of shitty, short lived jobs (the “wait” that gives the book its. There’s even the occasional fart joke, you know, just for good measure. It all adds up to a work that is, far and away, Wertz’s most honest work to date.

Bjornstrand by Renee French. Picturebox

I’ve got a lot of questions here. Let’s start with the simplest: what’s the word for a sequel released at the same time as the original, which itself might actually be a prequel to the other? A simultequel? A samequel? Whatever the case may be, I suspect that Bjornstrand is not a think meant to exist on its own, but rather a supplement to French’s wonderful new on-going webcomic Bjornstrand, which plays like It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, if Linus swore like a hockey masked sailor. The Picturebox-published mini is a beautiful thing to look at, no surprise there, with French’s characteristic fuzzy style reproduced in a purplish hue that brings to mind classroom mimeograph papers, making something deep inside fight the urge to give it one big huff.

I suspect the whole thing will make more sense at the web series unfolds, giving some background on the giant, adorable beast, who emerges from a body of water like some wide-eyed, beak Godzilla villain. As it stands, it’s a strange sequence of events -- albeit a delightful one with colorful curses, terrifically drawn, as ever. There are none of the grotesqueries here that define some of French’s earlier works, but there’s plenty of mystery to have at. And even if it never makes any more sense that it does today, I’ll never feel cheated, having been afforded the opportunity to spend a few more minutes in the cartoonist’s strange, blurry world.

Sabertooth Vampire Unleashed by Mike Russell. Self-published

Okay, here’s an old one (2011 old, that is), found on the mini comics shelf at the front of Portland’s absurdly wonderful Floating World comics. I’m not sure how I missed it the first go ‘round, though this is probably a good time to note that keeping up with webcomics has never been a particularly strong suit. I’m never sure whether to tell an artist when I’ve passed a book around to nine or ten people -- it’s one of those compliments that has strong overtones of, you know, taking food out of an artist’s mouth, $6 at a time. But yeah, I handed this thing to everyone I know in the Rose City.

Artist Mike Russell, I’ve since discovered, is actually a movie reviewer for The Oregonian. That’s all well and good, but someone needs to give this guy some kind of a cartooning medal for the hilarity he’s managed to squeeze out of the adorably thin premise of a diminutive Dracula with canines longer than he is tall ( had a rabbit once with a similar problem. Far less funny, that). It’s a vampiric disability with delightful consequences -- and some pretty fantastic merchandising tie-ins. In fact, here’s hoping it gets its own Adult Swim short one day, if only so I can buy one of those amazing Sabertooth Vampire mugs.

Gabrielle Bell: The Voyeurs (Uncivilized Books)

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Gabrielle Bell without a sketchbook in her hand. Such things are, naturally, common accessories for indie cartoonists, but Bell seem to don hers like a pair of eyeglasses, as though the world might be headache-inducing and blurry without them. Her autobio strip “Lucky” is the fruit of those sketches, and The Voyeur is the bunching of those fruits, as ever with Bell, at its best when the lines between mundane realities and magical realisms become ever more entangled, the further one ventures into a story.

No better when the cartoonist relates an attempt to adapt Valerie Solanas' infamous SCUM Manifesto into sequential form, unraveling into a tail of adult movie theaters and Japanese assassins, related by Bell’s infinitely interesting mother. Not that the realities themselves are entirely mundane, of course -- particularly in the wake of the artist’s rise to an indie comics celebrity of sorts. There’s the stormy relationship with filmmaker Michel Gondry, the mind-numbing trip to San Diego Comic Con (as highlighted in the first iteration of this nascent column) and the mattress-on-the-floor living that comes with living on an artist’s paycheck in the Big Apple. It’s simultaneously nakedly honest and whimsically untrue (like getting called out by Gondry for skinny dipping merely for the sake of comics fodder), because being a voyeur doesn’t always mean you can trust what you see.

Doug TenNapel: Cardboard (Graphix)

The guy who created Earthworm Jim gets a lifetime pass, so far as I’m concerned. The potential for such laurel resting hasn’t done much to slow Doug TenNapel’s output over the past few years, however. As per usual, the artist’s latest makes no effort to brush off his customary darkness for the benefit of a younger audience, constructing a strange and gritty sort of world through an oversized cardboard box. TenNapel does, however, happily revel in some cliches to get there. There’s a winking nod to the mysterious magic salesman typified by the likes of Gremlins and an origin story that owes more than a little to Pinocchio and possibly The Indian in the Cupboard.

And yes, the kid gets to be a hero here, along with his loving, if deeply-flawed father and the selfless animate cardboard boxer. TenNapel brings this all to a head in an adventurous climax that unfolds in a self-replicating cardboard universe, and judging from the complex cartoony characters rendered in his scratchy inks, he clearly enjoyed drawing ever minute of it.

Jesse Jacobs: By This Shall You Know Him (Koyama Press)

But cardboard worlds has nothing on the blue and purple dreamscapes conjured up by Jesse Jacobs, constructions of complex geometric shapes and winding organic matter, where primitive humans and floating space gods struggle independently with concepts of creation and destruction at what appears to be the dawning of a new universe. It’s a grotesque and playful, which struggles at every level of Jacobs’ broad evolutionary scope -- beings are manifested out of nothing and cave people learn that hard taught biblical lesson of not smashing your friend in a head with a blunt object.

It demands a re-reading and a re-reading after that, and then maybe the whole thing starts to make clear sense. I can’t say for sure yet, as I’m only on the second go-round -- but if you beat me to number three, definitely let me know.

Carol Tyler: You’ll Never Know Book Three: Soldier’s Heart (Fantagraphics)

Eight years and 350 pages later, Carol Tyler concludes her trilogy, the tale of a family impacted by a soldier’s service in the second World War. In this third book, Tyler takes her father on a road trip across seven states to visit the newly constructed WWII memorial, continuing to weave dad and daughter’s lives in a narrative told through scrapbooked memories from diaries, war journals and more traditional means. It’s a touching and heartbreaking examination of the ways in which individual journeys ultimately affected multiple generations of families.

Tyler wraps the tale with the heartfelt story of her arrival at the monument. It’s a nice piece of closure for the three-volume memoir, though, as the epilogue clearly notes, as long as we’re still kicking (as both her parents are at the close of the book, having made it into their 90s), the story’s never quite complete.

Bonus:

Kate Beaton: Hark! a Vagrant Calendars (Drawn & Quarterly)

Is it 2013 yet? I’m getting pretty antsy staring at these two Kate Beaton calendars firmly entombed in their shrink wrap. Three months left to go, and I’m already considering a pre-emptive strike on next year, to get a sneak peak at 12 months worth of historic hilariousity, like my friend in elementary school who never failed to finish the advent calendar by December 5th. Gonna go down to bookstore and pick up some deeply discounted 2012s to tide me over.

Photo: Ryan Hyde (cc)

"Comic books are cheap, shoddy, anonymous. Children spend their good money for bad paper, bad English, and more often than not, bad drawing." -- Dr. Fredrick Wertham, 1950s anti-comic book crusader, quoted from his book, Seduction of the Innocent.

Comics Rack 01

Nurse Nurse, by Katie Skelly (Sparkplug Books)

If there's any justice in the world, Katie Skelly's mini comics collection will one day be adapted into some strange, low budget sci-fi-sploitation flick, complete with firework explosions and barely visible fishing wires suspending strange and wonderful spaceships on their journeys across the solar system. And if, god forbid, Skelly should lose creative input along the way, perhaps some over entitled studio executive will chose to spell things out a bit more clearly, with a Corman-esque title like Vixen Nurses from Venus.

Not that Nurse Nurse isn't a perfectly adequate title, of course, but if we're ever going to sell Skelly's vision of outerspace anime filtered through the lo-fi comic zine aesthetics of John Porcellino and the like to late night basic cable, we're going to have to punch that name up a bit, right? Does Nurse Nurse convey the sort of butterfly-goop-induce psychedelic trips and panda-headed space pirate planet-hopping adventure the New York-based cartoonist has managed to convey in her child-like thick penned line? Perhaps -- and really, as long as we can squeeze in a handful of tracks from cosmic dreamboats Quality Confections -- a sort of teen-pop version of the Spiders From Mars -- onto the soundtrack of our hypothetical adaptation, the box office returns should be enough to fund a Neptune-based sequel.

Blindspot #2, by Joseph Remnant (Self-published)

If we were Joseph Remnant, we'd be rubbing elbows with Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton on some French villa as we speak. After all, the cartoonist was handpicked by Harvey Pekar to draw Cleveland, the book that has, sadly, something of a posthumous epilogue for the autobio comics pioneer turned reluctant movie star -- an encapsulation of the writer's life entwined with a brief history of the city he loved. Thankfully, however, instead of hobnobbing with counter culture comics bigwigs, Remnant opted to put together a long-awaited second issue of his self-published floppy, Blindspot.

Like his heavily-hatched artwork, which has drawn more than its share of well-deserved comparisons to Crumb (thanks, at least in part, to the Pekar connection), the decision to serialize books in this manner harkens back to another era, increasingly rare in the face of full-length graphic novels, which, among other things, fit more comfortable on the shelves of a Barnes & Noble. The decision provides, among other things, the opportunity to break away from Pekar's well-defined vision, which has driven Remnant's most prominent work thus far. Blindspot's best pieces are its shorter ones. The lead off tale of a self-obsessed indie musician and a single-page portrait of a jovial security guard are highlights, along with the customary Pekar tribute and a back page wink to a storyline abandoned from the series' first issue.

Sammy the Mouse Book One, by Zak Sally (La Mano)

Visualize, for a moment, what Walt Disney's nightmares must have looked like -- now imagine what William Burroughs must have seen on those occasions when the dream machine beamed happy visions into his sleeping brain. Sammy the Mouse has made a home in the overlap between these two worlds, bossed around by a disembodied deity, hassled by an abusive alcoholic duck dressed like Captain Ahab and generally terrorized by a pointy-toothed skeletal creature with a knack for popping up at the most inopportune moments.

Sammy the Mouse is a strange fever dream of the book, initially off-putting in the somewhat grotesque filter it applies to Toon Town, but ultimate totally engrossing in the unfolding of its strange and complex storyline. This new edition is also beautifully crafted, handprinted by the author himself, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, which allowed him to move this collection of minis to his own self-run press.

San Diego Diary, by Gabrielle Bell (Uncivilized Books)

Okay, okay, so this is an old one (released this time last year), but what better way to prepare oneself from the spiritually straining mindfuck that is San Diego Comic Con than the story of an indie cartoonist plunged into nerd culture's biggest pop-culture bacchanalia? Anyone who's ever read Gabrielle Bell's autobiographical work can tell you that the artist clearly just wasn't made for these times, a fact evidenced by extreme social awkwardness in even the most subdued of social gatherings. This, placed against a background of throngs of costumed showgoers (please see exhibit A: the morbidly obese Batman on the cover) and MTV pool parties makes for an incredibly entertaining affair.

Granted, Bell's arguably at her best when indulging magical realist flights of fancy (see: Cecil and Jordan in New York), but San Diego Diary offers a wonderful portrait of the gulf between the worlds of independent and mainstream comics cultures.The inclusion of roughs at the end is a nice added bonus as well, offering some insight into the sketchbook, which never leaves Bell's side.