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There's no crying in baseball, but in this Ben Sears comic, there are superheroes and ghosts playing the game. Brian Nicholson reviews.

Wrote about the new Ben Sears book for The Comics Journal.

Amanda Baeza's second short story collection explores color, form, and ideas of moral urgency. It is reviewed by Brian Nicholson.

Back at The Comics Journal, writing about the work of an artist I discovered here on Tumblr, @amanda-baeza, many moons ago.

A few winners from Cram

Started to write up a post about my favorite self-published comics of the year so far and then realized I basically wrote about all of them and forgot about it, so I will instead say that the new batch from Cram contains some winners. I sorta wish Cram was not committed to risograph books that end up having a sorta high price point, because in the case of publisher Andrew Alexander's new one Caught Lookin' in particular I feel like readers are contending with a pretty classic alt-comic, beginning the serialization of a graphic novel about chess one could easily see being a paperback book that sells in perpetuity a la Ghost World, really excellent stuff I'd like to see reach the broadest audience possible, outside the scene of people who regularly go to small press fests and order stuff online. There's a section of full-color pages in the middle too but were I in charge I would've just cut that stuff to have a black and white comic, offset-printed in large numbers and widely distributed. But the comic we have is great too and absolutely worth picking up if you are all inclined to be the sort of person who checks out such a thing.

And while you're ordering that, you shouldn't skip the new one from Philadelphia's Nick Bunch, Resurrection Of Low Down Coyote. I know Nick, we are friendly, but he is, in the classic mold of men, a bit emotionally guarded as a person, which comes through in his work in various ways. His previous book, How To Quit Smoking Cigarettes, has a bit more limited of an emotional register, related to the sort of anger and frustration one might feel while going through withdrawal from nicotine. This one speaks to a little more of a range of complex feelings, never feeling maudlin or pandering but just honest about what being alive is like, with joys and sorrows both. Really great stuff. Fascinatingly drawn. While Andrew Alexander's work comes off buoyant and rounded, lively, Bunch's penwork is all angular and gnarled, trying to find forms within a line that wants to scratch. The bits of color are subtle and soft, analogous to the flushes of emotion bleeding their way through.

There's also a new issue of the Cram anthology out, 5, which contains work by Cameron Arthur, Anand Shenoy, Sam Szabo, Michael Kennedy, and James Collier, with covers by Lillian Ansell, Nick's girlfriend, and a one-pager from Swayam Parekh, Andrew's girlfriend. Is it sexist to refer to people as being the girlfriends of other people? Yes probably but both women feature in their partner's autobio strips and while I dislike the price points of scene exclusivity I do find the work deepened by knowing the characters therein.

Connor Willumsen one-pager from 2011, appeared in Les 48 Heures De La Bande Dessinee de Montreal, edited by Vincent Giard. Broken up into three images on account of my scanner, forgive the not-great alignment.

#connor willumsen

BATMAN: DARK PATTERNS

I mentioned, in my contribution to 2025's Best-Of-The-Year List at The Comics Journal, that I appreciated Hayden Sherman's art on Absolute Wonder Woman and was interested in reading the Batman series, Dark Patterns, he was providing art for when it was released in a book collection. Dark Patterns is a Batman comic made for guys my age, a real nineties throwback kind of book, twelve issues split up into four three-issue arc, like some of my favorite Legends Of The Dark Knight arcs, (James Robinson's "Blades" or "Spook," for instance.) or the Peter Milligan/Kieron Dwyer "Dark Knight, Dark City" take on the Riddler. In a very real way, this takes that arc's approach to the Riddler, at the time a decades-old character, famously depicted in a television adaptation, and applies it to The Ventriloquist, a character created by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle at roughly the same time time Milligan and Dwyer did their revisionism. So it's a sort of 1990s Batman squared approach.

Contrasted to Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta's Absolute Batman, it is a comic that avoids the fist-pumping moment of climax in favor denouements unfurling a mystery's motivations, which are often tragic. If Dan Watters' scripts don't quite give Alfred the wit (and Anthony Burgess references) Miligan did, he is still writing a Batman whose monologues you can read to yourself in Kevin Conroy's voice.

Hayden Sherman's art is great, recalling such greatest hits of Batman art as Marshall Rogers, Graham Nolan, and JH Williams III, a mix of swirling layouts and straightforward line that is always readable and propulsive, moving through the architecture of physical space on the page. Triona Farrell's coloring is preferable to Jordie Bellaire's work on Absolute Wonder Woman, albeit only by degrees. Sherman is an artist whose approach to an open page is clearly built with color in mind. The design sensibilities of Farrell's coloring means working with a palette chosen from the infinite crayon-box, which is in some ways less interesting to me than the choices of an Adrienne Roy, but I still like what I'm looking at.

Congratulations, too, to the editors, for making the collection an attractive book. I'm still mad about how the Absolute Wonder Woman collections reproduce the two-page spreads of credit sequences printed in every one of the single issue, eating up fourteen pages of real estate with info that should just be credited up front, and then commissioning dozens of variant covers which either don't appear in the collection or appear in shrunken form. Here is a series that only ever had one variant cover per issue, allowing for easy reproduction in book form, and with a little interview of commentary in the back. Also, while the price point for the single issues was beyond what I'm willing to pay, thirty dollars for a collection of twelve comics is fine.

An Addendum To A Eulogy

I got perhaps disproportionately angry at a social media from a mainstream comics artist in the wake of Sam Kieth's death. "Why do we only talk about artists after they die? Let's celebrate artists while they're alive. I'll start: I love Tradd Moore," is my paraphrase of the basic gist. This seemed ill-timed to me, in terms of its appearance in the first 24 hours after the announcement of Kieth's death, but that's not the issue for me really. The pseudo-positivity ignores basic reality: We did talk about Sam Kieth when he was alive, and people talk about Tradd Moore too. People do talk about living artists, and share their enthusiasm regularly. What bothered me is the false equivalence. People were talking about Sam Kieth not just because he was a maker of cool images who had died recently. People were moved by the death of Sam Kieth because Sam Kieth made personal work. He's not just the guy who drew a cool Wolverine comic and some cool Batman covers. Those pieces present a certain energy, a promise of comics' potential that he articulated elsewhere in personal work that connected with people and touched them. That is his true legacy, and contemporary mainstream comics artists like Tradd Moore and the guy I'm mad at but am not going to name because I'm embarrassed at my anger would do well to follow this example.

To a certain extent, I can believe that we attract the books to us that we need, that will help us in our quest to become ourselves. This is obviously aided by economics of distribution channels, which decide what the public is allowed to access. Reflecting on the continued public demand for The Maxx, as opposed to the almost-immediately-forgotten genre comics which flood the shelves, from the time of that comic's release to the present, I am left to think that maybe people don't care about that work because it would never be necessary to someone in the same way. It doesn't risk enough, or offer enough of itself, for anyone to care, instead choosing to operate in the shallow waters of one of CBS' procedural dramas. Meanwhile, a work like Twin Peaks continues to move people.

This is not to say I want work that is necessarily inspired by Twin Peaks, or The Maxx, or that I think everyone toiling in mainstream genre work could have a hit if they got weird with it. Kieth and Lynch are particularly strong artists. Who knows how many are as capable of saying something about the human experience beyond just regurgitating the movies they've seen? Many attempt to do something different and lapse into floundering incoherence.

But it's hard not to see equating Kieth with Tradd Moore (who's good at drawing, and I'm not mad at, even if his comics to date are all disappointing, falling somewhere on the spectrum of poorly-written to actively unreadable) without thinking of someone saying "We should talk about Denis Villeneuve too" when Lynch died, because they both made a Dune movie. It would point to the speaker's thinking the highest aspiration in the field of cinema is to make a movie like Sicario. (I like some Villeneuve movies fine.) It is like being so afraid of even thinking about death you never contemplate the idea that art can be a bid for immortality. Immortality's impossible, of course, but to be remembered fondly as work is revisited outside the cycle of hype and consumption, growing in one's estimation as one grows older, looks much the same from a mortal vantage.

#Sam Kieth #Dave Feiss

Sam Kieth Sequential Tart interview

Probably not going to find a better interview with Sam Kieth than this two-parter from Sequential Tart from 25 years ago

http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/dec01/kieth.shtml

http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/jan02/kieth_2.shtml

#Sam Kieth

RIP SAM KIETH (1963-2026)

Extremely saddened to hear of the death of Sam Kieth from Bleeding Cool. Sam Kieth's art was monumental to me, and really so many people of my generation: The first time we saw comics art that was recognizably fucked-up and weird, in a way where he also all, instinctively, loved it. Noel Freibert wrote about the experience of seeing his art in issues of Marvel Comics Presents for Bubbles, I had a similar experience to the same issues. I think it can be hard to articulate how we both loved comics but also recognized the art style of them, even the stuff we liked, as "normal" in a way where Kieth's art registered as a deviation that we responded even more strongly to. This is happening to us when we're, in my case, eight years old. Seeing a Marvel Universe trading card Sam Kieth did of Nightcrawler IMMEDIATELY made Nightcrawler my favorite X-Man, just the way Kieth's art registered with that design.

And then after that is The Maxx, which was an Image comic so unlike the other Image comics, and got made into an MTV cartoon, and it was again, so recognizably WEIRD, but on such a huge platform, that it CONNECTED not just with kids getting into comics but kids who were going through adolescence and having a tough time of it, just a part of the same alternative culture as Nine Inch Nails and grunge, and articulating these concerns in a way that registered to the adolescent mind as ART. The letters pages of The Maxx are littered with teenage survivors of sexual assault, writing to Kieth to tell him his work helped them. All these kids, feeling understood by this comic book which is in many ways pretty goofy, a mix of some Frazetta fantasy imagery, a character who's a massive shape, a strong desire to just draw whatever, and then this sort of Jungian processing metaphor trying to make sense of all these impulses.

And he kept going, he kept making work. Zero Girl is in part a processing of another aspect of Kieth's death which is so so sad to me - the wife that survives him, Kathy, after 43 years of marriage (the woman who worked on the letters pages and all the classified ads and personals in the back of The Maxx issues) was a generation OLDER than him, having met him shortly after he graduated from high school. I can't imagine marrying someone that much younger than you, with all the likely subsequent difficulties of sexual incompatibility I'm sure there would've been at many points, and then having to take care of them through an awful-sounding disease and lose them as they die so young. Kieth's series My Inner Bimbo is also partially about the difficulties of such an age gap relationship, and also some gender stuff. My friend James claims he once read an interview with Kieth where Sam basically came out as trans at one point, but the interviewer did not want to process it or get into at all, and just wanted to talk about Batman or whatever, but I don't know where exactly this interview ran or if it even exists. The sense of sympathy and empathy Sam had for women does run as a thread throughout all his work.

And this is all downplaying or avoiding discussing the fact that Sam also penciled the first half-dozen issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, another hugely influential comic book to the youth of the nineties alt-culture, and while Neil has been revealed a huge piece of shit, Sam was not, Sam was dedicating the trade of those issues to everyone in jail. He did some work which afforded him something almost no one in American comics gets - actual money, which presumably is one part of why he was able to not disclose his illness and essentially beg for money publicly. William Messner-Loebs, the scripter of The Maxx, ended up homeless a few years ago, but presumably it is the perennially in-print and generating royalties Preludes And Nocturnes trade (and also maybe getting a cut of profits from Knightfall, the Batman arc he provided some covers for) that was able to take care of him. He was someone who likely knew how beloved he was, and we should all be so lucky. And to me what's great is that such wasn't always the case, you can see in the letters pages to the Aliens miniseries he did people writing in to complain about the cartooniness of his art, which of course work that's so idiosyncratic is going to piss people off. That's what makes it art. We wouldn't have loved it if it were immediately palatable to the squares.

In time I will likely assemble a gallery of some of my favorite images of Sam's. If I don't it will be because I can't, because there are simply too many of them, and that their impact is truly judged by how unlike every other comic around. I know I redrew a cover he did for part 4 of Knightfall as a show flyer probably fifteen years ago. It had stuck with me for so long, that image of Bane squared off against Killer Croc, Robin in the middle, tied up in the sewers. That and the Nightcrawler card: inscribed on my memory. I wish I had torn out and saved the black and white preview art from Zero Girl that ran in Previews, that was also so beautiful to me in a way that the color diminished. I've loved his work for practically my entire life. What a force. Rest in peace, rest in power.

#Sam Kieth #obituary #RIP

A Few Early 2026 Faves

Alright, we're almost at the end of first quarter of 2026, and I have been remiss about posting on here about the minis that have made a big impression.

First off is the Dash Shaw newspaper which I'm going to refer to as "Special Memory," although it has "Like Swimmers" written in much larger letters upon its front page. Like Swimmers is Shaw's upcoming full-color book from New York Review Comics, much anticipated by me, and this newspaper includes some discards from that book, alongside a short story I really loved. Seeing panels from it out of context made me laugh but also made me imagine other story possibilities than what the comic itself presents - this sort of misinterpretation an example of how rich and generative the comic as a whole is.

Next up is the CF mini Ultima Multis, still available at the time of posting. Thought this was such a great concise restatement of both CF's themes and also his approaches- both the slapdash porno doodler and the inscrutable fantasist are palpable here. It feels very casual and bordering on stupid but damn it rocks. I liked his last zine Pale Lucifer too.

Molly Lecko Herro's Meatloaf Castle 2 represented a leveling up, I wrote the author a little e-mail trying to explain what I liked about it- Something about her strength with both visual storytelling, body language and spatial navigation being so clear but also a sense of the symbolic that is woven throughout a piece but then when it is understood what it is it hits like a punchline. I would describe it as a Doucet-like approach, Austin English clarifying what I mean in that we have a cartoonist exploring their ideas like monologues rather than come up with names for characters. You can see a similar approach in the work of Angela Fanche, who's got a new one I just ordered but haven't read yet. That's called In The Corner/Sun-Deprived, It's a split with Maybelline Skvortzoff, of the book Dirty Panties, the two having met during a Kus residency in Riga.

Speaking of Kus, they released the mini Not From Home, Not From Beyond, by Romania's Dina Omut, who has released a larger thing with Hollow Press. Omut's work is the sort of folklore-inspired fantasy with a tactile visual style that feels in that video game exploratory mode, taking a real pleasure in drawing. One to watch.

Also Chris Cilla's That Away Comix came out last year but I didn't get it until now, a really strong work from Cilla, maybe his most overtly narrative comics style zine in a while, as opposed to some more sketchbook-forward projects. This one is gorgeous, with a silkscreened cover, but also possesses a sense of comics as a medium as something related to the aging record-collector weedhead mentality I find very familiar. Hard to cite specifics without spoilers, but I really loved it, thought it was funny and surprising.

Also gotta shout-out issue 5 of Anand Shenoy's series Zoo, brought to America by Bubbles' Brian Baynes, issue 4 of Kevin Huizenga's Fielder, and issue 2 of Marvin Yaxam's Tales Of Qyleoth. I don't feel the need to explain what these comics are, as I've spoken about all of them at length basically, and imagine everyone is familiar with their respective approaches.

The fastest way to catch up on any of these you might be hearing about for the first time is to place an order with Copacetic Comics, I think.

Two sequences from Franco Saudelli's series Otto Porfiri, translated into English by Dark Horse in 2002, courtesy of the same publishing initiative that released the Trillo/Mandrafina comics I've written about previously. Saudelli was an Italian comics artist, whose series The Blonde was published by Fantagraphics' Eros line in the nineties - it's pornographic primarily in the context of fetishes for bondage and feet, which means it basically reads as PG-13 and is not actually sexually explicit. The Otto Porfiri stuff have the sort of sleaziness where the main character might need to go to a strip club to investigate a crime. Anyway, I think Saudelli's a pretty good comics artist, on a black and white visual storytelling level, even if there's nothing in these comics that's particularly moving or suggestive of ideas about anything other than bodies in motion through space. I think I discovered his work because of seeing pages of original art from The Blonde on Ebay and considered buying them.

#Franco Saudelli

Volume two of Keiichi Koike's ULTRA HEAVEN is out now, it rules, fulfills the promise volume one made that it would be wilder visually and go further down the hallucinogen-paranoiac path to feel like you're going insane. Excellent stuff. There is a blurb on the back attributed to The Comics Journal which is the last six words from the review I wrote, which is frustrating since I tried to make that review fun and interesting to read and by picking the most generic bit it seems like a pretty mild recommendation.

Thinking About Anthologies Again

A consultation with Amazon's Advanced Search has revealed to me that Fantagraphics' anthology NOW is not quietly canceled after all, and there's another one in the offing, a couple years after the last installment. The price point keeps going up too, seemingly not the most successful project in Fantagraphics' lineup but since so much of their output these days is Disney/Marvel reprint material anything in the classic "alt comics" style is worth noting, or at least trying not to lose track of.

NOW exists in contrast to Fantagraphics' previous anthology MOME by shying away from serialized stories - MOME was a real product of the graphic novel era and featured a lot of longform work, which I guess produced disappointment in regular readers when stories didn't appear every issue. ZERO ZERO, from the nineties, also had a lot of serials in it. Something that strikes me, as I do my own bit of wishcasting of what an anthology I edited would be like, were I somehow given control of a budget to put such a thing together, is both the "short stories only" mindset and the "serializing longform graphic novels approach" are not actually how many cartoonists work. A lot of artists use recurring characters, telling self-contained stories with the cast who might then reoccur further down the line, or else telling stories that maybe take place in the same world, but nonetheless conclude their thoughts when a story ends. I would consider autobio comics artists to essentially be doing this.

What I'm saying is, while Fantagraphics' anthologies have traditionalyl been modeled after a literary journal - Mome most explicitly in its packaging, despite all the serials - a comics anthology could probably be thought of more usefully as like a chunk of time where one gets to watch TV, checking in with old friends - whether they be the cartoon characters of The Simpsons or the real-life figures of a game show like Jeopardy. You don't necessarily let down the audience, but can create a structure where any appearance of a familiar face is a delight.

I do believe that an anthology works best when it appears regularly, and something like what I'm thinking of as "preferable to NOW" would ideally be on a monthly or bimonthly basis. Truth be told, the model I most often think of is mid-nineties Dark Horse Presents, when edited by Bob Schreck and Jamie S. Rich before the founding of Oni Press, which would serialize the likes of Paul Pope alongside Renee French, or Dave Cooper next to Jason Lutes. I have gone from thinking of this as a more optimistic era's idea of what could be financially successful to thinking of it as probably a money-losing proposition of weird shit which is what led to new editors getting hired. I still think black and white is probably better than full-color printing, because the power of an anthology, on a flip-through, is the diversity of approaches and the contrast between them. I do think you want something thicker than a thirty-two page comic though, to allow for more substantial chunks of story. I'm thinking something in the 48-to-80-page range, as over 100 pages becomes exhausting in a way where things start to blur together.

My rules would have it there were only two longform. tightly serialized stories running at a time tops. I do not like the thing in DHP where a story would end and another would start in the same issue, thus prohibiting clear "jumping-on" points. Only two autobio stories per issue tops, and even that meaning one longer piece and one that's in the one-to-three page range. Only one gnarly horror thing per issue tops, only one weird experimental character-less thing per issue tops, as these are things that can overpower quickly.

And now, the obligatory list of people I would want to include in a theoretical black and white anthology published at traditional comic book dimensions. Many of these are people currently self-publishing series, or else seem off the radar at the moment in a way that suggests the power of encouragement: Max Burlingame and Angela Fanche's WWREC stories, or either of their solo work; Miles MacDiarmid's Key Change series; Lale Westvind's “Life And Limb” serial currently running in Void Packer; Chris Cilla's Blue Onion; Daria Tessler's Cagelessness or whatever else she wants to do, they're one of the few I'm listing who’ve been in NOW or been published by Fantagraphics; Matthew Thurber's Looking For The Cat would look much better in offset printing than the risograph approach currently found via Neoglyphic; Molly O’Connell's Shriekers stories; Marvin Yaxam's Qyleoth; Conor Stechschulte's Vacuum running in Crepusculine is not black and white but I also believe he has another serial he wants to start, although that also might not be black and white; Margot Ferrick is someone a publisher should really just be working with to put out everything they want to do in a solo anthology IMO, Rebecca Kirby has had pieces in Reptile House recently; Pris Genet's Cyanide Swamp contributions are a serial of sorts; Nick Bunch's Desert Rats; Audra Stang's assorted character dramas, CF's Causeway likely has something that could be in a recurring comic book. Dash Shaw's been publishing newspapers with original short stories in them, the new one is probably the best comic I've read so far this year. When I mentioned horror stuff, I'm thinking of the work Jemma Sharp runs in Fondant, and this person who releases work under the name Manual Hybrid who I met yesterday and immediately told Austin English to get in touch with so their work could be stocked in the Domino store, watch for it. When I'm talking weird experimental stuff, I'm thinking of Tim Ng Tvedt and Walker Tate. The autobio people I'm thinking about are Gabrielle Bell, Allee Errico, Daryl Seitchik, and Nate McDonough; all have wildly different approaches. As for people who actually make great short stories, that I wish were more accessible, I'm thinking of people like Anand, of the series Zoo; Clair Gunther, published in Bernadette and 2DCloud publications; Molly Lecko Herro, of the series Meatloaf Castle; and Connie Myers, whose comic published by Cram last year I think many await a follow-up to. Antoine Cosse, Patrick Kyle, Lala Albert, Eleanor Davis, and Connor Willumsen are all people I haven't seen published in a while but believe will always be greeted warmly by readers. James Collier might work best in color but while I'm listing cartoonists whose work is generally underseen I feel the need to include him.

A mea culpa is in order.

I wrote about the latest volume of Hobtown Mystery Stories for The Comics Journal, following up on my having written about the previous volume a few years back.

RIP TATJANA WOOD

Tatjana Wood died the other day, at the age of 99. Born to a Jewish father in Germany in 1926, she emigrated to New York City in 1947, where she met and married Wally Wood and began working in the comics industry. They'd divorce before he killed himself. She became a prolific colorist for DC Comics, perhaps now most associated with Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. Due to how comic book production works, much of the coloring credited to her in the trade paperback collections do not match her original contributions, composed for the printing and paper of the day, and not preserved on film the way the lineart was. Scans of the original issues capture her artistry. Here are some examples, all written by Alan Moore and lettered by John Costanza:

From the DC Comics Presents issue presenting a team-up between Superman and Swamp Thing, "The Jungle Line." Pencils by Rick Veitch, inked by Al Williamson.

From Swamp Thing 44, penciled by Steve Bissette and inked by John Totleben.

From Swamp Thing 53, penciled and inked by John Totleben.

From Swamp Thing 63, penciled by Rick Veitch and inked by Alfredo Alcala. These later issues were printed in DC's "New Format," rather than on newsprint, and the colors are more vibrant. Another book Tatjana colored for DC printed in the New Format around this time was The Question, written by Denny O'Neil and penciled by Denys Cowan, lettered by Willie Schubert. Later in the run it was inked by Malcolm Jones III. Here is a two-page sequence showing Tatjana's coloring on that series:

In the nineties, comics color changed its production process further. This page from the series Brainbanx shows Tatjana Wood working with the computer color separation house Heroic Age:

Brainbanx was written by Elaine Lee, drawn by Temujin, and has lettering by Richard Starkings and Comicraft. I would say it is the use of digital fonts which makes it seem less appealing and dated. But it is worth noting, in selecting these pages for particular moments of striking power, that Swamp Thing, in particular, is filled with beautiful impactful and iconic moments, and The Question is well-regarded for its consistency and approach to action and character. If Brainbanx is forgotten, that is likely not nearly the fault of the creators involved as it is owed to a corporate culture that, while it would print creator-owned work, would not necessarily see it as a viable money-maker when making decisions about keeping it in print or marketing it long-term. But that's an argument for another day! Really I just wanted to include a later-period Tatjana Wood piece, and that series was what I had on hand.

#tatjana wood #swamp thing #john totleben #rick veitch #Alan Moore #Elaine Lee #Denys Cowan #The Question #Denny O'Neil #Steve Bissette #Temujin #comics #rest in peace

Brian Nicholson reviews Mara Ramirez's latest comic from Fieldmouse Press.

I have a new review up at The Comics Journal today. This one demanded I call it "punk," which meant I also had to explain what I mean by that, since some words, if you use them too much, lose all meaning.

Brian Nicholson dives into 23rd Street’s publication of Total THB Volume 1 to see if how Paul Pope's previously uncollected series holds up.

A book collection of Paul Pope's THB has been in the works for thirty years, my essay about it for The Comics Journal has been in the works for considerably less than that, but still longer than you might expect. Give it a read, why don't you?

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