I haven’t seen anyone talk about the comic book convention mystery CSI: Dying in the Gutters, and after they worked so hard to draw direct market attention to it, too. Maybe everyone’s waiting for the trade (due next month)? Here’s the premise: at a Las Vegas comic convention, internet gossip Rich Johnston is killed, electrocuted when he touches a rigged microphone while standing in salt water. So many creators have reason to kill him that the CSI team has trouble […]

Keith Knight has put out a second collection of his (th)ink comics. Where The K Chronicles are multi-paneled and often biographical, (th)ink more closely resembles editorial cartoons. They’re single panels that directly address political issues. And they’re darned funny! The material in Are We Feeling Safer Yet? is often raw, but I can’t argue with the points made and the anger he’s expressing. I doubt any of the cartoons would convince someone who disagreed; instead, these are rallying cries, giving […]

Eddie Campbell has been cartooning for a long time, and in Alec: How to Be an Artist, he shares his wisdom about the field in an autobiographical ramble through his career. Campbell constructs his pages around a nine-panel grid, only without borders. His art is spare, as though dashed off in a pen-and-ink sketch, but such apparent carelessness only comes with decades of experience. The narration sounds as though it’s slightly removed from events, as suits a jaded look back, […]

I finally read Lost Girls, but I’m not sure I have a lot to say about it. It was exactly what I expected, from the descriptions: three volumes of pornography featuring Alice (of Wonderland), Dorothy (of Kansas and Oz), and Wendy (of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys). There’s something here for every taste — boy/girl, girl/girl (the majority, by the numbers), boy/boy, rape fantasies — and some that seem to be included just to gather attention, such as incest, […]

Tony Consiglio’s 110 Percent may have been overlooked by many readers because of its subject matter. It’s the story of three middle-aged women who are fans of the boy band 110 Percent. Although many comic readers will understand and perhaps sympathize with the dedication and even obsession of these women, it takes a willingness to approach their story that unfortunately, some may not have. These women aren’t young, cute, or sexy; they’re not even mildly attractive as they take their […]

This slim volume is a great companion to the Box Office Poison phonebook. BOP! More Box Office Poison reprints Alex Robinson’s short stories from the SPX anthologies (there was a piece in each volume from 1997-2001), Private Beach #4, and the color special published by Antarctic. It also contains Robinson’s 24-hour comic and a new story showing how Caprice’s friends deal with her ex-boyfriend. Since most of these were written as stand-alone stories instead of chapters in the bigger graphic […]

In comparison to Alec: The King Canute Crowd or Alec: Three Piece Suit, After the Snooter is a more modern work, more in keeping with the Eddie Campbell of today instead of decades ago. The most obvious difference is the dropping of the Alec psuedonym — Campbell’s now Eddie, raising kids and publishing for himself (an endeavor he seems to have since stopped, with his former website gone and Amazon listing his books as coming from Top Shelf instead of […]

Alec: Three Piece Suit collects three short books previously published as Graffiti Kitchen, Little Italy, and The Dance of Lifey Death. I very much appreciate the way Campbell includes a brief publishing history of his work on the indicia page. Knowing when he drew the stories and when and where they first appeared helps put his autobiographical work in the appropriate context of the times. These were all drawn between 1983-1993 and were originally published from four-six years after their […]