Following up on the events of Chances Are…, This One Goes to 11 begins with a hurricane threatening Puerto Rico while Tom can do nothing but worry long distance about his girlfriend Lily. He’s taking his stress out on his co-workers and family in realistic portrayals of how people distract themselves from big issues with smaller disagreements, punctuated with asides on problems with the media. Such a tense situation, a matter of life and death, drives the realization of the […]

Sonovawitch!, the next book after Tales of Supernatural Law by Batton Lash, contains the lengthy title story about a man’s mother casting a spell that causes a colleague to fall in love with him. It also features a morality play about a doctor who’s legally enjoined from transitioning his patients and a mob vampire story told entirely through TV screens. A set of stories focus on Mavis the secretary, about her decision on how to respond to her boyfriend’s proposal […]

This series, formerly titled Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre, is easy to sum up: two lawyers represent a variety of monsters in cases ranging from the punny to the parodic. Background storylines, usually involving the cast’s love lives, provide continuity, while their ever-changing caseload deals with established horror conventions, including vampires, zombies, and curses. It’s quite amusing to see how such a factual, evidence-based profession interacts with the vagaries of the supernatural. This collection, first in the series, […]

Thieves & Kings is a classic fantasy adventure, with a young witch and a lost princess, a forgetful wizard and a boy thief, pirates and palace guards. Mark Oakley wonderfully creates the effect of another world. While I was reading the collections, anytime someone would interrupt, they’d ask if I’d been taking a nap, because surfacing from his kingdom was like returning from far away. The first volume begins with Rubel, the thief, coming back to Highborn after four years […]

To promote their release of the Middle Man trade paperback, Viper Comics has made the first issue downloadable for free. That’s a great idea. Nothing sells product as well as a free sample, assuming that the product is any good, and this one looks like a good one. The first issue is well-done, with an interesting character with a distinctive voice. Wendy’s a temp who wants to be an artist, and because she’s disinterested in her day job answering phones […]

Wandering Star is a story of interstellar adventure that begins as a flashback, with an older Casandra Andrews recalling her activities during the war. Her father was President of the United Nations on a post-WW III Earth with a destroyed environment. Earth was asked to join the Galactic Alliance, but their people were considered second-class citizens and barbarians because of their aggression. Basically, Earth was allowed in because the other planets needed a thug on their side in order to […]

The K Chronicles is a weekly semi-autobiographical strip about a struggling cartoonist and musician — Knight is half of the hip-hop group The Marginal Prophets — living in San Francisco. This isn’t a typical newspaper comic, mainly due to the nature of some of the jokes, which have involved vomit, snot, poop, cannibalism, and penis size (illustrated). Common themes include family, the difference between the East and West Coasts, popular culture, liberal politics, foreign views of our country (through his […]

In this scientific fantasy, two mites living in the follicle of Charles Darwin’s eyebrow tell each other myths about the creation of the world, involving a motley collection of humorous gods. It’s sort of a cosmic game of telephone, taking events and making them bigger and different in the retelling over generations. For some unknown reason, Darwin is able to hear one of them, Mara, when she speaks. Their resulting conversations about how life came to be touch on myth, […]