I regularly read books of funny comics by creators I’m not familiar with. This is usually great – new funny stuff! new perspectives! potentially new favorites! – and there are lots of books out there by lots of funny people. But then I come to write about them here, and I worry that I’m saying…
I bemoan the sorry state of single-panel cartoons a lot here – because I like them, and because they used to be a massive tide rolling across popular culture, so there were many more of the things I liked, albeit mostly before I was born – so it’s nice to be able to balance that…
I felt lazy yesterday, and wanted a book I could read quickly and then write something quickly here. I may have been too lazy, if that’s possible. (I have my doubts.) So I read John Lustig’s Last Kiss: Casual Fridays . It’s a short, digital-only collection of that strip from 2013 – much like Sex Day…
I sometimes look at a Groo book and think “that will be a quick read, and an easy one to write about.” And then I’m wrong on both counts. It happened with the three-book Friends and Foes series in 22-23, and it just happened again now. Groo looks quick and breezy, but it’s a wordy comic, and…
I try not to be a gatekeeper. I have standards and expectations – and, like everyone else, some tropes and styles and story-structures I like better than others. But I like to think I can take the how and what as it comes. So I haven’t mentioned the syndicated comic “strip” Last Kiss here before, as…
Three years ago, when I saw the first collection of John McNamee’s Pie Comics – it’s called Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears ; it’s funny; you should read it – I thought the strip might have ended, and was mildly sad that only the first of the strip’s three collections were available in my library’s app….
As far as I can tell, this 2018 book is the only collection of the “Sketchshark” comic – more than that, it’s creator Megan Nicole Dong’s only book to date, and “Sketchshark” was the title of her (long-abandoned) Blogspot site and maybe the original title of the (only mildly abandoned) related Tumblr , which now…
I like to link to webcomics when I can, though these days, it’s weirdly difficult. A lot of creators seem to just post on their normal social media, since that’s where all of the algorithm-driven traffic goes anyway, and running an ad-supported site is basically a hellscape mostly left to the hardy souls who have…
Bogart Creek may be yet another thing I discovered only after it ended; it looks like creator Derek Evernden stopped posting it on Instagram and Reddit a year or so ago. On the other hand, he’s published three books, the website is still there, and there’s a Patreon , so maybe he just managed to paywall…
Chip Kidd is one of the premier book designers of our day, and a big proponent of comics as an art form. He also has a tendency to get…let me say “fussy”…in his designs – he came of professional age in the go-go Nineties, and that can be seen in his work sometimes. He also…
One of the oddest things, for me, about the contemporary cartooning world is that everybody has to be an entrepreneur now. (I mean, yeah, I know, late-stage capitalism hits all of us and all that jazz, sure, but even more so for cartoonists.) It used to be that cartoonists who did lots of different things –…
Names are not unique: I need to remind myself of that every so often. Today I have a book of comics from a small Canadian publisher called Renegade Arts Entertainment, and, at first I thought, “Renegade? Surely it’s not the same one?” It’s not. The Renegade I was thinking of – Renegade Press, the mid-80s…
