The Mini Comic Library

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...