This is the blog of comics critic Rob Clough. I have writings elsewhere at SOLRAD.co, TCJ.com and a bunch more. I read and review everything sent to me eventually, especially minicomics. My address is: Rob Clough 881 Martin Luther King Junior King Blvd Apt 10 i Chapel Hill, NC 27514
Jonathan Baylis has been writing comics for about a decade now, working with cartoonists to relate anecdotes from his life in the tradition of Harvey Pekar. What's changed for him over the years? Well, as evidenced by the latest issue of his anthology series So Buttons , he's starting to think like less as a writer and more as an editor. What I mean by that is that the way he sequences has become…
Adaptations of prose works into comics form can be tricky. How much of the original prose should be kept? What should be trimmed? How does one transform one medium into another while doing justice to both? In the case of K. Woodman-Maynard, it's her use of layout, page composition, and especially color that sets her apart from similar, more visually mundane attempts at adaptations. That was true…
While Cuyler Keating's comics have fantasy elements, it would be more accurate to say that she's really a medievalist. What that translates out to is a great deal of misery, death, disease, and squalor. That's certainly the case in the first two issues of her series Oblivioun , but Keating takes that a step further. The setting is a world where the empire is in ruin, plagued by a disease that…
What's most interesting about Ruby Arnone's Frankie & Jam is that, despite its origins as a formal cartooning exercise with some formal constraints, the actual comics are fluid and funny. It follows a trans woman anthropomorphic bunny named Frankie and a hoodie-wearing kid named Jam, with most of the strips featuring their observations, gags, and general quirkiness. One of the reasons why the…
With Arroyo , Melody Calderon does the best kind of horror comic: one that is almost entirely dependent on its visuals to tell its story. This is a story about the Latinx horror urban legend La Llorona, the "Weeping Woman." She was said to have drowned her children in a fit of rage against her husband's infidelity, and now she lurks around bodies of water, looking for new victims. An arroyo is a…
The Final Dot is one of the CCS group anthology projects. This one features Dylan Sparks, Ellie Liota, Michael Albrecht, and Anna Passlick. I was excited to get a copy at SPX, because I've never seen one of these outside of the library at CCS. Looks like the take on the assignment was a take on Harvey Comics characters. The artists, who shared tasks like in an old mainstream comic, chose to do a…
Kiki is a small departure for the talented Wayne Carter. This 8-page mini is done in full color (I think it's a Risograph comic), and it packs a lot of punch. It's about two brothers who play a fighting video game on a day when the weather forces them to stay indoors. The real action of the comic is hearing a fight between their mom and dad, as the former accuses the latter of cheating. There's a…
Ana Two is one of the most exciting artists to emerge from CCS this decade (and I believe this so fervently, that we will be publishing book by them soon). This little mini, Storm Drain , came from this year's Riff Raff anthology, which in turn is edited by CCS alum King Ray. This is only a 4-page, but so many of Two's interesting storytelling elements are at work here. This is a two-track…
Daryl Seitchik has built up an impressive body of work since their first minis over a dozen years ago, and I was especially excited to see another "Missy" comic. These comics are adapted from her childhood diaries, and Seitchik seamlessly works that material into a visual presentation that offers up ironic, funny, cruel, and deeply sad juxtapositions against the original text. As the title…
Kicking off another year of reviews of alumni and students of the Center for Cartoon Studies, it's fitting that I should start with Colleen Frakes. This is the 20th anniversary of the school, which is frankly astonishing. It points to the need for and viability of a focused curriculum for comics, as comics have become a more pervasive medium in the past twenty years. Frakes was one of the first…
Suzan Colón was a student of mine at SAW (Sequential Artists Workshop) last year, and she hit on an ingenious concept that she's working to bring to a longer form in her series Wrasslin' Centaurs. (Full disclosure, she listed me as an editor of this comic.) The concept is, on the surface, a silly one: a world where mythological creatures like centaurs and cyclopes are real and living in the modern…
The second chapter of Tanya Dorph-Mankey's queer wrestling epic, Count The Lights, ratchets up the tension between the intense heel wrestler Alan Jacobs and his infuriatingly casual rival Ryan Roberts. The story is told from a kayfabe perspective; that is, that the matches and stories behind them are real. Dorph-Mankey works big: big pages, big panels, big fights, big emotions. Wrestling here…
Meg Lentz is a SAW graduate whose work focuses on queerness, mental health, and social justice. Working through their alter ego, Lenny Ditz, Lentz's comics are usually very funny. Working through their assignments in SAW's year-long program, Lentz stretched into poetic comics as well. The second issue of their Lenny Ditz comic continues on the memoir track, with Lenny graduating from comics and…
Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's Dungeon (or Donjon , in the original French) is my favorite comics series of all time. It's a giant, sprawling epic that's both a love letter to and a send-up of fantasy spectacles. It spoofs overly convoluted world-building and plots while establishing its own deep lore. The essence of the story is this: there is a dungeon, run by its Keeper, that actively…
There's only one more issue of Whit Taylor's series Fizzle to go after the fourth and fifth issues, and the fourth issue turns inward while the fifth issue has competing flashbacks and forward movement. The story revolves around Claire, an adrift twentysomething living in Los Angeles who's in an orbit of mutual aimlessness with her rich stoner boyfriend Andy. She works in a yuppie, high-end tea…
Jason's latest collection of short stories, Death In Trieste, once again finds the cartoonist doing deep-dive riffs into art history, pop culture, and pulp fiction. The result is something of a mixed bag. His work is always a pleasure to look at, as the smooth pen strokes and precise lettering, combined with his trademark, stripped-down, anthropomorphic character design, provide unwavering fun. As…
So I recently found my copy of this perfect little minicomic, Duh! Ha-Ha! , that Casey Nowak did some years ago. This was back when Carta Monir was still running Diskette Press. It's a brief reminder that Nowak is one of the best working cartoonists in the world, even if their output has greatly slowed in recent years. (On my docket is their compilation of short work, Boy Chest ; they're also…
There's a lot to take in with Kayla E.'s stunning long-form debut, Precious Rubbish . When I interviewed her recently, she noted that the name and the logo were the first things she created when she decided to write about the horrific events of her childhood physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of her father, mother, and brother. The title alone reflects the use of contradictory…
Keiler Roberts' first book with Drawn & Quarterly was My Begging Chart. For a while, it seemed like it would be her last original book for them. She did a collection of her Koyama Press work called The Joy Of Quitting and a collaboration with her brother Lee Sensenbrenner called Creepy that bore little resemblance to her other work (which may well be why she did it). Then she quit comics, with…
My review of Jonathan Baylis and his collaborators' new issue of So Buttons (#14) comes at a momentous time for the writer, as this issue was just nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Anthology. It's unusual for a self-published minicomic to be nominated for any award, so this is quite an achievement. The funny thing is that while I think it has his single best story to date, the issue as a…
I usually do all of my Center for Cartoon Studies reviews all at once, but I'm making some exceptions with the recent batch I've received. It's always a pleasure to get new comics from Iris Yan , whose dry but blunt sense of humor always delivers. Yan is extremely prolific, for good and ill, but when she takes her time, her anthropomorphic figures add a lot to her storytelling. She also frequently…
Eric Haven's comics exist in this weird liminal state between EC horror comics, 1970s Marvel monster/science-fiction epics, John Stanley comedy, and otherwise uncategorizable pulp fiction. Dating back to his Tales To Demolish days with Sparkplug Comic Books, his publishers have clearly always understood how his comics work on multiple levels and have an appreciation for their pulp aspects. There's…
It's not an exaggeration to say that Carol Lay has had one of the weirder careers in comics that I can recall. She started her career at the dawn of the Alternative Comics era, doing shorts for Weirdo and Wimmen's Comics as well as commercial work for DC & Western. In between working in animation and doing storyboards for Hollywood, she was one of the more successful cartoonists in the alt-weekly…
Jason Martin is often hailed as one of the best writers in his sphere of comics, which is autobiographical & poetic observations. Indeed, I first became aware of him thanks to Papercutter #17, an issue of the dearly missed anthology that featured a number of different artists interpreting Martin's stories. However, I also greatly admire the spare economy of his line. He's an excellent example of…
Many of Elise Dietrich's autobiographical comics have been in the form of travelogues, but Kill Your Idols follows a different journey: one into the musical idols of her past. This is mostly about Dietrich as a teenager, "a mostly unformed mass of anxiety and passion." Music and art can often provide both an outlet and a template for teens, as well as a parasocial relationship that can inform…