Joe McCulloch is here with his usual guide to the Week in Comics!, looking at all the best-sounding comics new to stores. And because it's a relatively quiet week at the stores, he's kindly offered a bonus short essay on The Crusaders.
I dunno.
There's a part of me that thinks "if your comic doesn't have a cover like this, you should just go home." I mean, holy crap - what's even happening?! I can't really describe the physics, or even the spatial relationships here, let alone the completely jarring and horrific juxtapositions of digital textures, but the fucking CHAOS of this image is fantastic. I want to see what's inside even before I notice that old-fashioned box in the upper left corner, and I realize Chick Publications is at it again.
Meanwhile elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. The most recent Inkstuds features Kevin Czap.
—Reviews & Commentary. Rob Clough reviews Tom Gauld's Mooncop and Lisa Hanawalt's Hot Dog Taste Test.
Her first book, a collection of assorted short stories and other ephemera titled My Dirty Dumb Eyes, was not quite the Full Hanawalt experience that I had hoped for. It was still really out there and funny, to be sure, but it felt a little safer and a little more measured & restrained. That's understandable, given that many of those pieces were assignments, rather than directly personal work. I was worried that her new book, Hot Dog Taste Test, might be similarly muted in content. Instead, despite the fact that most of it is a collection of work published in a food magazine, I found much of it to be not only Hanawalt's sensibilities fully unleashed, but also to be remarkably personal and even poignant at times.
At Best American Poetry, Laura Orem considers the "naked Trump" statues in relation to other political caricatures.
I've been very interested in the debate about the Donald Trump statues. Some find them offensive as fat-shaming, transphobic, or simply in bad taste. Others find them hilariously apt. I collected these 2-D caricatures from history because I wanted to pin down what it is about the DT statues that causes such a strong reaction, as opposed to other unflattering caricatures of him that are all over the media.
—Misc. The New Yorker published a new strip by Art Spiegelman, as well as a short selection of strips by other cartoonists that he considers one-page graphic novels.
Steven Heller looks at Trump.
The Comics Studies Society plans to start publishing Inks again next year, and it looks to have a very strong lineup of talent.
