I haven't written any small press comic reviews for a while, so here's a quick recap of some of the books I've read recently...
Tony McGee's Outcastes is revving up towards its three-part climax, yet with all the drama, revelations and plot twists contained in issue #9, I really have no idea where this book will go next. All hell just broke loose - quite literally. (Don't you just hate people who overuse the phrase "quite literally" or use it in a completely inappropriate manner? Like "I just coughed up a lung - quite literally". No, because if you'd literally coughed up a lung, you'd be dead. You mean "quite figuratively", if you mean anything at all. It's like that bloke on Come Fly With Me who always says "pardon the pun" when he hasn't actually made a pun. No? It's just me is it, again? Oh well, forget I said anything.)
Anyway, so much of great import happens in the latest Outcastes that you really need to have read the previous issues to truly appreciate it. So I suggest you start here. It's worth the effort, particularly as the latest issue contains the best art of Tony's career... and I've been following that career avidly for many a year now, so I know what I'm talking about. Quite literally.
While you're over there, you might want to check out Tony's online strip Eva Nova, which Tone describes as Love & Rockets + Halo Jones + Futurama. If you enjoy that as much as I did, he's also flogging actual paper copies too.
Sean Azzopardi's 100 Days Of Winter is another touching autobiographical story from a writer/artist who's fast becoming one of my favourite small-pressers. This takes the form of a series of illustrated diary entries between October 2009 and February '10, tracing the frustrations of working life, the artistic struggle, relationships, and the story of Sean's sick cat, Nobby, which is genuinely one of the most moving things I've read all year. But I'm a sucker when it comes to cats...
Buy 100 Days Of Winter, and sample more of Sean's work, over at his website.
I read Douglas Noble's Live Static in the car late one afternoon while waiting for an appointment I'd turned up really early for. Daylight was fading, I was all alone in a strange part of town, slightly edgy about the meeting ahead... and Douglas's story really freaked me out. It's a creepy-in-the-extreme tale of a fractured relationship and television gone bad. Douglas describes it as "a horror story about love, a romance about memory, and a dream of forgetting". To get the full effect, I suggest you read it in similarly discomforting circumstances. Brrr...
Find out more about Douglas's work here.
Finally, The Comix Reader is a 24 page newspaper print anthology of short strips by a variety of alternative cartoonists, most notable for the contribution by the legend that is Ralph Kidson (because I can never get enough of Ralph's work) but also featuring fascinating, amusing and thought-provoking work by the likes of Richard Cowdry, Gareth Brookes, Jimi Gherkin and others. All that for a quid? Bargain. Go to this place and buy.
Don't forget, there's more comic reviews by me (and Rob, and occasionally Paul and Steve) over at Comics On The Ration. I've recently reviewed Essential Hulk #6 and Mike Carey's Unwritten, while Rob has been slogging his way through volume after volume of The Walking Dead - presumably so you don't have to.
