Calvin wants to remember how he feels about comics

Grail by Brooke Hearst is a fun, brief, satire. Which I had a good time with. The more tried and true elements (psycho HOA head, weird sex dungeon stuff) mesh well with and are made more exciting by the more novel stuff (adult professional social media personalities, modern paranoia). The style is very spare and soyjack-esque (in an oblique sense), but consistently applied. It's mostly carried by its writing, admittedly.

Masterful, beautiful. Deeply heartfelt and insightful comic about being an artist and growing up, and how being an artist means resisting growing up in some ways. And a love letter to his brother, who influenced his life deeply. Baudoin is an exceptional artist and story teller, drifting effortlessly between narration, speech bubble anecdote, and abstraction to cover two decades of his life in a propellant and immersive way. Really lovely.

They call him crying Freeman because he cries when he kills and he wants to be free. Extraordinarily weird manga. Sometimes-frequently bordering on explicitly pornographic, very baffling kills, just a very strange sense of what is cool. Freeman has a tattoo of a dragon holding a gun with a knife between it's teeth. Funny. Really well illustrated in a technical sense!

The ambitious amateur will always have a home at silver sprocket it seems... While I have a lot of admiration for aspects of this book: the use of spot blacks and scratchy shading was often well balanced, it drew from art styles that I really admire in ways that were recognizable enough, the main character is very distinctive in appearance, I ultimately did not like The Confessional very much. The art really struggled to be consistent and I found some of its central decisions really ugly and off putting, and I found the story trope-y and overly saccharine.

An emblematic page in some ways. Really good black-white balance, nice ink line backgrounds, all and all something I would expect to like, except the face of the priest character I find so off-putting.

Perhaps more emblematic... Strong poses and books decisions alongside Wattpad fiction-esque writing and this Internet core ass priest...idk I'm kind of cooked when it comes to explaining not liking things I'm too aware of all the effort and all the ways this thing went right despite how little I connected with it to want to rip into it anymore.

Not my usual fair. Barbara Brandon-Croft's style takes the idea of a talking heads type newspaper comic to its logical conclusion: literally just talking heads. Her eight simply illustrated characters are expressive to an extent, but the attitudes they show on the cover of the book demonstrate about the range of their emotions. The strength of Brandon-Croft's work very much comes from her writing, which is candid, full of character, perceptive, and, on average, quite funny. It's been a while since I've taken a collection of newspaper comics home with me from the library and these were a pleasure to read through over the course of a couple of days.

Sort of like nails on a chalkboard, but not in an altogether off putting way. A robust story built out of the feeling of waiting for a loved one who is arriving home later than expected and beginning to worry about them. This is built out on either side by a bit of intro where in we learn our leading couple is utterly insufferable, incapable of doing anything without bickering like children, and get introduced to a story within the story about another insufferable, bickering couple who's relationship is falling apart after a miscarriage and a conclusion that takes this paranoia and helpless fear to an emotional extreme, from which effective Pathos is found. If it sounds like I'm frustrated with these characters it's because I am, but I shouldn't be too hard on it. As the fear of the one left waiting at home builds, and as things progress beyond all that, I found myself right along with them, despite their prior obnoxiousness. It's well illustrated, in an understated and simple way. Consistent. While I bounced off some elements of the writing, it's still an undeniably strong swing, that's patient with the presentation of its ideas and creative in its form.

Richard Corbin is a really remarkable illustrator and visual story teller. Rat God didn't necessarily strike me as a story over all, but it's a funny and entertaining read. It feels like it comes from another time. He's got a very detailed and skillful style that can't help but impress.

There's some strange race stuff in here that just sits in the background making you scratch your head. When I read that it's a story in the tradition of Lovecraft, I was expecting the cosmic and existential elements, not the town full of people who are partially animal element. Corben tries to clarify his perspective by highlighting the absurdities in the US' past in an ending scene where our chauvinistic main characters University discovers he has a drop of Native American blood and expels him, but while this successfully suggests that his heart is in the right place, the town of rat people who are connected in some obtuse way to indigenous people that makes the body of this story isn't deconstructed in any way in itself. Weird!

Also notable is that there is nothing scary about this comic, nor is any of it particularly presented to scare. It's a piece of pulp adventure pastiche which clearly comes from a deep love if the source materials goofiness and bombast.

20KM/H is a collection of short visual jokes and puns with an exceptionally spare art style and an unearned sense of existentialism and profundity. It can be cute, but I was unsustained, but I could imagine this as a good coffee table book.

I think The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a pretty good manga! The characters all look like members of a Nu metal band and each story is a neat little supernatural mystery that ends with some sort of gross out course moment. Any moment that could lead to an emotion in the reader is undercut by our goofy, totally desensitized cast quipping or smugly posing. The art is okay, and comes together well for the spooky moments. For some reason a comic where full frontal nudity is OK'd. Tight. Consistent.

Bezimena is a pretty singular work, not so much a comic book as a picture book for adults. For most of its run, the story is told in connected pairs of facing pages, where one page, all black but for a speech bubble, describes the events and the facing page illustrates them in virtuosic detail. It's a story about sexual predation and delusion which, in putting the reader in the head of the predator, ends up toeing a line between a titillating imagined and very disturbing reality. It's an interesting balancing act, and while I'm uncertain whether I think it succeeded or failed per se, it lends a good bit of tension to the experience and makes for a more interesting read. Over all, I think it hits as a piece of outsider comicing, high art meeting low. The afterword by the author was very successful at tying the whole thing together, I thought.

Did I mention how incredibly gorgeous these illustrations are?

Cash undeniably has the sauce. Stories are charming, relatable but personal, well presented and illustrated. It's strange to see so much praise heaped upon a scant 35 pages of short diary comics, but I won't hold that against the work itself. I know there's been more made! Hush!!

This is a review for both Inuyashiki 1 and 2.

I think Inuyashiki is awesome. Like every story about someone who gets super powers, it lives in this weird world where you can't walk down a suburban sidewalk without seeing three attempted murders and every high schooler has a fifty percent chance of being fully psychopathic. Which is great television. The main character being the most pathetic and hated middle aged man that looks like a really old man possible is awesome, and while his personal plight is so overblown as to really only be comical, his joy when he's able to help people is genuinely sweet. It's a rare manga I think that marries its photobashed backgrounds and hand drawn character art without being totally off putting, and I think it does a fine job of it. The mechanical elements are a lot of fun, if sort of out of place in the style, very detailed and interlocked, thought out. I'm not sure if there's enough juice in the tank for the perpetual motion device most manga seem to want to become, but that remains to be seen.

I make things, so I'm pretty down on the whole "what drugs was he on to make this" schtick, but it's pretty clear Shintaro Kago is sick in the head. One of these stories ends with a girl shoving her pantied ass into the face of her grandfather so he won't forget who she is and cause her to disappear with his psychic powers. Definitely the weakest of the crop that one, but still so absurd and weirdly conceptual as to be impressive, in its way. The other three stories are much stronger. No doubt Kago is demonstrating some kind of fetish around the mutilation of anime girls here, and in the most grotesque fashion. Once I've said that about the stories it feels hard to defend my enjoyment of them, but I found him a very clever writer, with fun, left field story concepts, a weird, pitch black sense of humor which landed more often than not, and a really strong, spare illustration style. It's a fun crop of stories, if you don't mind the sex pervert stuff and the gore. Or perhaps even these things are a plus for you...I'll never tell...

A book I found very hard to take seriously given its incredibly lacking illustrations. I didn't give it much of a shot beyond the first few pages. Looks like a comic your middle school buddy shows you doodled in his notebook book margin.

Despite its on the nose, naval gazing dialogue, half the story being illustrated in this incredibly sterile, over referenced style and its writing over all suffering from cliche, pacing issues, and a comically grimdark tone, the one hand and the six figures manages to be more than the sum of its parts, and cumulates into a fairly satisfying finish. Some moments of paneling abstraction and strong presentation help it along as well.

Some kind of sin or crime to read this on my cell phone, hopefully I'll get a chance to read a physical copy soon. Vehlmann and Kerescoet prove that their resounding success with Beautiful Darkness was far from a one off event in another deceptively twisted and inventive comic. Gorgeous and unnerving.