The Mini Comic Library

I haven’t written about comics in a while. I think I got burnt out late last year and I haven’t been able to muster the energy or enthusiasm since. In terms of my reading habits, that’s really had two different effects: ·   I still pick up my pull list, and I still read through all the mainstream books I get, albeit often feeling like it’s a cumbersome task rather than one I particularly enjoy. I want to keep up with those books, and don’t get me wrong, there are moments of enjoyment I take from doing so, but it’s not been the same for a while. ·   I have a stack of small press books that I bought at events like The Lakes and Thought Bubble (and various things I picked up on their own), that I haven’t dared touch. That’s because I have a resounding feeling that those books deserve better than to be shoehorned into my ennui. They deserve some time and attention and I want to give them that, so I made a decision to wait until the time was right. I don’t know what it was tha...

The Woods by Aimee Lockwood EXCEPTIONALLY creepy, experimental, brave and utterly unique, The Woods by Aimee Lockwood is another strong entry into the burgeoning portfolio of one of the most talented new faces on the UK small press scene. The first thing that struck me about The Woods is the absolute commitment to craft that went into making it: An A6 handmade comic; The Woods appears to have been printed on a variety of coloured pages, with a series of 'windows' of varying shapes hand-cut from each page to reveal details from the following pages.  Just putting each issue together must have been a labour of love in itself, to say nothing of the thought that must have gone into designing it and the skill and talent that actually drew each wonderful page. One of the things I like the most about Lockwood is her refusal to be pigeonholed.  Her portfolio could easily be filled with charming, warm and engaging autobiographical stories that are as endearing as they are beautiful...

Food Chain by  Aimee Lockwood I  met Aimee Lockwood on my second day in The Lakes and I was charmed by her passion and excitement over comics, the talent she was surrounded by and the community gathering together.  She didn't hard-sell her comics to me, but honestly, her friendly nature and obvious love of the medium would have likely led me to buy from her. Except, I didn't need any of that, because the work she had for sale looked magnificent and I knew I wanted to buy everything she had the second I saw it. Food Chain is an intriguing collection, filled with charm and warmth, bursting with innovative ideas, techniques and personality, and one that hides a few nice surprises which mark Lockwood as a talent to look out for on the UK's small press scene.  From the first page of the opening titular story, Lockwood displays a talent for playing with the flow of words on her page - in one panel using a beam placed over a wooden tank as a convenient speech bubble, then ...

LUSH, hallucinatory and utterly unique, Andy Baron's Om series is a vibrant, visual tour de force of cartooning, overflowing with style and harbouring a poignant edge of humanity which belies the otherworldly inhabitants of its pages. First a confession: I've had the three Andy Barron Om comics on my shelf for some time.  Every now and again I have picked them up and flicked through them and in the end I have had to put them down again, because if I'm honest, I've just not felt ready to appreciate them fully.  That's because they are out of this world gorgeous and just some of the most accomplished, glorious cartooning I've ever seen in the pages of a self-published comic book.  Barron's artwork is like nothing I've ever seen before. It's baffling and bizarre but somehow familiar. His backgrounds are hyper-real dreamscapes, where bubblegum pink clouds fill the horizon. The weird and wonderful denizens that inhabit that world seem impossible, yet some...

A DEEP, dark, deliciously twisted bad trip of a book, Roachwell by Craig Collins and Iain Laurie, delights in its surreal twists and turns and the traps it lays for its unprepared audience.  Enticing us in with a bold, bloody and brutal cover that depicts a diver emerging from a pool of crimson in the middle of a drab, dirty, dreary kitchenette, replete with kitsch chequerboard tiling, Roachwell makes its motives perfectly clear from the get go.  It's an arresting and surreal image on its own, but one that only reveals its true intent when lined up with the cover of the duos other book Crawl Hole (Credit where it's due, Collins himself shared that rather macabre party trick with me). Like Crawl Hole before it, Roachwell is a scattered selection of the dark, weird and wonderful, single page horror stories as darkly funny as they are deeply disturbing. But Roachwell has a new trick up its sleeve, one I want to try not to spoil as much as I want to sing its praises. Because Roach...

My late teenage years and early twenties were plagued by a perpetual feeling that I didn't fit  in, probably common to many people at that age, but that felt deeply personal to me at the time. I felt awkward, clumsy, uncomfortable in my own skin, and more often than not ,  an outsider looking in at  other people who all  seemed  happier and  more self-assured than I  could ever dream of  being. Reading  The Adventures of Leeroy and Popo  brought those memories into sharp relief and  Roskosch's  work is a welcome addition to  an  established literary tradition of narratives focused on social outcast s who gaze in at the world from the fringes of society, exploring themes of alienation and self-worth, neatly wrapped in some virtuoso cartooning that all marks him as a creator worth looking out for in the future. Leeroy and Popo are outsiders in every sense of the word, perhaps most obviously in the anthropomorphic forms ...