Category Archives: Comics Reviews

Sliced Timber #1. By Nicholas Diak. Killer Pterri Comics. 2024.  32 pp. $9.99.

Nick Diak is a whirlwind of cartoonist energy! It’s page after page of fun stuff, coming at you in all directions, a kaleidoscopic journey paying tribute to MAD Magazine, various kid magazines like Nickelodeon and Highlights, Cartoon Network fare and a tip of the hat to such greats as Daniel Clowes and even Moebius.

If you are looking for a grab bag of loopy and goopy comics, this is an impressive effort from a rising talent. I can see the passion and determination on display here and it gets my attention. I think that’s the number one thing about new comics on the scene: they need to make you take notice. That’s because so much has already been done by so many other creators at such a higher level than a newcomer could ever hope to overtake. It depends upon what the cartoonist is trying to achieve. Is it just a hobby, something to do with a bunch of pals or is it a calling? Because, if you’re taking this seriously, the comics need to have some X factor, something truly genuine at its core, whether it’s weird, personal, hilarious, whatever the case may be.

It’s total mayhem!

For example, Nick does a great job with, “KXW,” a 5-page comic about a clown and other colorful characters in a wrestling match scene. The clown eggs on these two ogres and then suddenly a human-velociraptor hybrid is unleashed. It is full-on goofy, so be sure to tap into your inner 12-year-old. And that’s the beauty of it. I’m not sure exactly what is going on but, then again, whoever is when it comes to pro-wrestling. Nick states in the back page notes that this story honors hours of playing the Nintendo 64 game, WWF War Zone, and hours of viewing the now legendary YouTube podcast, Cartoonist Kayfabe.

The point I’m making is that new comics need to have something to offer, an X factor, and this comic book delivers with its uninhibited exuberance. Even the little extra surreal bits give added impact, like a pterodactyl off to a corner on the comic book cover demanding, “Eat more comics!” Funny. Goofy. Done with passion and determination, Sliced Timber by Nick Diak, is a comic book just waiting to be eaten!

Milky Zest. Steve Hogan. Acid Keg Comics. One-Shot. 2024. 28pp. $5.99

I would never tell Steve Hogan to stop making comics even though this comic book is begging me to do so. Ah, I only kid. I kid in the stubbornly ironic way that Hogan loves. If you followed alt-comics in the ’90s, you know precisely what brand of humor I’m talking about. It permeated the very air. All of hipsterdom worshiped the crass sarcasm tempered by a devastating self-deprecation. That was Gen X sensibility for you. In our youth, we valued spot-on humor and were not overly timid and cautious in its pursuit. It was a certain vibe we were playing with in music, fashion and comics: Peter Bagge’s Hate; Daniel Clowes’s Eightball; Rick Altergott’s Doofus, and so on.

Steve Hogan provides a sharp wit that harkens back to the snarky humor of ’90s alt-comics and makes it his own. At a deeper level, Hogan also honors the respect for craft with spot-on design sense. The antecedents date back even further to mid-century modern, dealing in crisp clean lines and a wry and dry sense of humor, often dealing with wacky and larger-than-life subjects. To engage in this kind of comics as a cartoonist today is certainly tricky. You don’t want to just repeat something that essentially already was a sly post-modern look back. That said, this retro style of comics is totally valid and various contemporary cartoonists work in it to one degree or another: Sammy Harkham and Rich Tomasso are a couple of excellent examples. As you can see from the page excerpt above, and the panel excerpt below, Hogan revels in visual treats and packs in as many added gags as possible.

The story for this comic is a fun MacGuffin-packed roller coaster of a tale. If you like a good comedy thriller with the very fabric of reality at stake, then this is for you. And, along with all the irony, there’s even a sweet romantic subplot. It turns out that our hero, Milky Zest, is a good guy with Tuesday, a good woman, by his side. It’s up to Milky to prove his worth as the newbie at a private detective agency. Little did he know that he would end up in the thick of a case with earth-shattering repercussions. Yeah, that sounds about right. All in all, I enjoyed this comic and, without a hint of irony, I look forward to what Steve Hogan does next.

Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition. Steve Darnell and Alex Ross. New York: Abrams, 2024. 121pp, $25.99.

Guest review by Paul Buhle

The Special Election Edition came out just in time, more or less, for the most disappointing election in recent US history. Or just in time to drive the main point of this extraordinary comic home: the utter confusion in what the US has been, stands for, might be, remains very much the national saga. No matter what any politician (maybe not Bernie Sanders or AOC) says. The bilge of the politicians’ messaging still makes for indigestion and the worst may be ahead.

Never mind, let’s focus on the comic. Darnell (the scriptwriter), Ross (co-plotter, so called, and illustrator, joined by Todd Klein on Lettering) caught me flat footed in the original 1997 printing. Like any other radical historian of the 1960s-80s generation, I was not likely to expect anything so riveting, no immanent critique of “Americanism,” from the mainstream comics industry. Sure, gay and lesbian superheroes had been added, not to mention the popularity of noir comics with heavy social implications. Uncle Sam was another geography.

So much so that its real value, and I hope real impact, is difficult to characterize. The tall fellow in the funny suit with suspenders emerged in the nineteenth century, definitely boosted by the tall (and homely) Abe Lincoln but goes back to earlier self-celebration. You might say that it borrowed a little or a lot from the “Columbiad” celebration of the marvelous creature (actually a semi-clothed female) entering the New World with perfectly innocent intent, an image displaced by icons from the neoclassicism of the Roman Empire: the heraldic eagle, counterpart to the “Senate” on “Capitol Hill.” Uncle Sam was more the fighting type, of course, but he had God on his or our Side.

Thus the First World War posters set the pace, with actor James Montgomery Flagg as model for Red Cross fundraising and recruitment messages, not to mention contemporary sheet music illustrations and magazine covers. We have been stuck with the guy ever since, actually recreated as a comic book action hero by none less than Will Eisner in the 1940s.

This book’s Uncle Sam is anything but clear-minded or resolute. He’s homeless and hapless, a broken old man wandering through a deeply sick society. The cruelty of the present for this pathetic dumpster-diver drives him back to a real and imagined past, or many pasts. He finds himself, for instance, in a modest domestic scene with a kindly wife during the Revolutionary War. She explains that George Washington is a slaveowner protecting his own fortune. Sam, a healthy looking Sam in his 30s, can only say what he will say again and again, “I pray this war will make us better. All I know is that I can’t let it make things worse.” Off to battle, presumably. Too soon, he finds himself in a modern USA where “I walk past a nation that’s covered in equal parts of dirt and despair.”

The voices inside his head won’t go away, like Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of State on Native Americans, “We must frequently promote their interest against their inclination” as they are sent on the notorious death-march Trail of Tears. Sometimes, it’s John Brown who is quoted, sometimes journalists describing the inhuman behavior of white mobs assaulting a black prisoner later on in the nineteenth century.

Uncle Sam, at the scene of Civil War battles, is particularly beset. Here, if anywhere, is the Good War. My own Great Great Grandfather, an Abolitionist who marched with Sherman through Georgia, making the continuation of slavery impossible, would surely have said so. And yet it did not seem to bring the purge of racist sins that idealistic Americans hoped for, quite the contrary: the excuse in advance for other wars with idealistic claims entirely false.

A survivor of the Dust Bowl, looking remarkably like the wife of the first Uncle Sam, can only say, “We had it coming.” Rip away the top soil for short term gain and what else should be expected; the craving for constant expansion provided its own rationale and rationalizations.

And so Sam grinds onward into the 1980s and his apparent appropriation by the New Right where public manipulation becomes almost open: “If there’s one thing I learned about you, the American people…it’s that you…fear change.” Sell them emotional security, sell them the image of liberalism as the enemy, and any protester can be bashed on the head, jailed, even slaughtered.

In Sam’s head, he is still marching to the tune of Yankee Doodle, while in reality he sits in jail, referencing MLK, Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti.  Sooner or later, he gets to the slave pens and is released as harmless, only to meet Miss Britannica, Sam’s original.

The horrors relived from here to the end of the book are less words than pictures, and less horrific in images (with some exceptions) than in the messages being driven home, page after page. An Empire acts like this or it wouldn’t be an empire.

Paul Buhle