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By Arnaud Loumeau (United Dead Artists)I saw this book at Desert Island Comics, and it blew me away. This is a book of colorful, psychedelic symmetrical drawings done either on graph paper or at least drawn on a grid by Arnaud Loumeau.There's no text on the front cover, back cover, or spine. There's no indicia. The artist's last name, the title of the book, and the publisher are mentioned very small and close to the binding a few pages in.
By Simon Hanselmann and HTML FlowersThis cuddly mini-comic is all about the chaotic Megg, Mogg, and Owl characters, Werewolf Jones, and his monstrous and malnutrition'ed brood, Diesel and Jaxon. Despite it's small size, there are six whole stories in this book. The inside is all lines on green paper, which doesn't look as pretty as Simon's fully painted work, but it's still gold.
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By Junji Ito (Viz Media)Junji Ito is best known for making the great and scarifying Uzumaki comic a couple decades back. In that one, a whole town becomes obsessed with spirals and people start mutating into horrifying spiral-based monsters until the whole town is sucked up.In this new collection of old horror stories from the Japanese horror manga master, shit is still creepy in that Japanese horror sort of way. Lots of ghosts and slow-building dread.
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By Jay Howell (Last Gasp)When I look at this collection of Jay Howell's zines, I just immediately want to throw the book down and start making zines again. Jay Howell is best known for designing Bob's Burgers and Sanjay and Craig on the TV, but he also did some stuff with Trash Talk.
Edited by Craig Yoe and Fester Faceplant (IDW Publishing/Yoe Books)Steve Ditko is best known as the guy who created Spider-Man, but he had a long career before and after that. This hardcover book collects them. Some are good, and some are great. It's amazing how much creepiness Ditko could accomplish in such a short amount of pages. I like Craig Yoe and I like what Craig Yoe puts into books. I often feel less than psyched on the cover design for his books, but it's not a huge issue.
By Conrad Ventur (Boo Hooray)
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By Ginette Lapalme (Koyama Press)Ginette is a Canadian lady who is a part of the Wowee Zonk comics collective. Her aesthetic is all about pastel colors, cats, and talking pussies. It's all really cute and neat to look at. A bunch of the comics in this book originally appeared on VICE.com and Ginette's wearing a shirt I drew in her photo, so how come VICE and I didn't get mentioned? What about me???? That's my major take-away. "What about Gazin??????" I wish someone would use that as a quote on the back of their book when they put quotes from their reviews on there. "Critics rave! VICE Magazine says, 'Hey! What about me!?'"
By Alexis GrossThis is a zine of color photos where the pictures in each spread relate because one side is from 2013 and the photo on the other side is 2015. I forget which side is which year, but it's a really good photo zine of the same shit everyone likes in photo zines. Punks, random garbage, naked hot people, naked weird people, funny stuff. You know, what a good photo zine is.
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By William Exley (Nobrow Press)This is a really prettily drawn comic about a camper who meets a rock monster and the rock monster makes a great tree house. The story's pretty basic, but the art is insanely skillful and cute.
By Jonny NegronIn this mini-comic, Song of Mercury, Jonny Negron drew a comic about a sad man talking to his grandma on the phone about his break-up. Then a ghost girl visits him. There's no awesome thick lady drawings, but it's still good.Black Hole Son contains some one-off drawings and text about loneliness and hostility and then a roughly drawn comic about police fighting people.
By Sam Bosma (Nobrow Press)This is a well-drawn comic about an adventurous duo who live in a world that's like Final Fantasy, and then they have to have a basketball game with a mummy to get a treasure or something. Like a lot of comics, it seems to be heavily referential to video games.It's well-made, but has nothing going on at its core. In that way, it's a lot like the episodes of Adventure Time, where Finn and Jake get stuck in a haunted gladiator arena. But Adventure Time had a lot of jokes and weird things going on and even subtly seemed to suggest that the gladiator ghosts were in gay partnerships with each other. This book is just a little flat.Buy it from Nobrow Press.See you at New York Comic Con or just on this website again next week! Follow me on Twitter and Instagram, please!