Mineshaft #19
By R. Crumb, Peter Bagge, et al.
MQ Publications
I’m a touch embarrassed to admit that, until my recent interview with Kim Deitch, I had never heard of Mineshaft. The artist mentioned the publication in reference to his brother Simon’s work, which had appeared in the magazine in prose form. While Simon is credited as a [...]

Black Ghost Apple Factory
By Jeremy Tinder
Top Shelf
Sadness is a powerful hand. It’s universal and potent, and in terms of artistic fodder, it can hold its own alongside between love and happiness and terror and loss, and as such, it’s one that’s almost always overplayed.
Jeremy Tinder deals in sadness. He writes books with titles like Cry [...]

XXX Scumbag Party
By Johnny Ryan
Fantagraphics
Somewhere, in some suburban home—one of those fabled “good Christian houses,” perhaps—a mother, “cleaning” her son’s room, finds a copy of Angry Youth Comix, hidden under his mattress, beneath an a few copies of Playboy, which had been borrowed from schoolmates with more forgiving parents, or perhaps pilfered from a pile, [...]

The Plain Janes
By Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg
Minx Books
Media outlets covering the world of alternative comics have spent a considerable amount of time and effort attempting to convince a mainstream audience of that now clichéd adage: comics aren’t just for kids anymore. Such attempts have been met with a varied amount of success, but there’s [...]