Waterwise by Joel Orff is an experience to lose yourself in. The protagonist is drawing his ex-girlfriend by the side of a lake. His sketch builds slowly, in companionship to his thoughts of her as he realizes that their relationship is truly over. Then an old friend, a girl he had a crush on when they were younger, breaks his reverie. Orff’s style is dense and primitive but strong in its skill. It’s brilliant at establishing mood on a wordless […]

I originally read these two creepy stories by Sandy Jarrell as a minicomic, but both are now available to read online. The first, Don’t Play, the Game’s Not Safe, is about a bunch of kids trying to scare each other with trance-like games. This story does a fabulous job of realistically capturing kids playing around with the unknown, imagining grisly fates for each other. The art, pacing, expressions, and shading are all great, and the writer knows just when to […]

Destined Love is a cool little meta-superhero comic set in the late 60s by Sandy Jarrell with Vance Sumner. It blends Astro City-like superhero daily life and real cultural history in the format of a nurse romance. It’s an ambitious project that could go wrong so many ways but doesn’t. Annie meets the superhero Bastion of Freedom while treating one of the people he’s recently saved, and they have dinner together. She’s curious about his relationship with one of his […]

This gorgeous painted graphic novel uses humanoid animals to create a crime story with all the atmosphere of a classic noir film, complicated by the more modern concerns of racism and hate crimes. Blacksad: Arctic Nation is written by Juan Diaz Canales and illustrated by Juanjo Guarnido. Blacksad is a panther private eye investigating the case of a missing child against a background of color-inspired harassment. A group of white-skinned and -furred animals make up a Nazi-like group that preaches […]

Smut Peddler #3 is a minicomic anthology of tasteful but titillating erotica. 48 pages of diverse sex-inspired stories for adults for only $5! I’m the Submissions Editor (which means that the folks who do all the real coordination and assembly work — Trisha L. Sebastian, Sean Bieri, and Carla Speed McNeil — ask me what I think during the selection period, and I’m quite honored to participate). That means this is NOT a review! This is me telling you why […]

Doctor Who: The Tides of Time says it’s the “complete run of Fifth Doctor comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Monthly“. I can’t argue with that, but I had a bunch more questions after reading it. Since it started as serialized, it’s a dense read. I finished the first seven-part, 50+ page story feeling as though I’d completed a typical graphic novel, and I had six more stories to go. (I didn’t like any of them quite as […]

It doesn’t surprise me at all that this, as a minicomic, was pushed by James Sime and as a book, was published by Larry Young. All three have in common a sense of importance orthogonal to reality and as a result, all three are achieving their goals based on building their own legends. 1000 Steps To World Domination is a series of mostly four-panel, one-page cartoons. They all revolve around Osborne’s desire to rule the world, although some connections are […]

Vögelein is a clockwork fairy, built by a talented watchmaker centuries ago. When her latest Guardian passes away, she has to find someone to keep her wound up in order to keep her memories alive in Vogelein: Clockwork Faerie by Jane Irwin. Her antagonist/counterpart is a dark fairy, the Duskie, who’s been reshaped by technology into looking like he’s made of skeletal twigs and wire. He collects microchips and other modern mechanical detritus, causing havoc as he breaks the machines […]