1. Schizophrenic, sometimes swinging from memoir to analysis in the space of a paragraph.
   
2. Bereft of any footnotes that would help solidify some of his more dubious points.
   
3. Full of his usual crazy-man jibber-jabber about his hallucinogenetic* past, further fueling the sort of people who like to say “he’s on drugs” when they can’t offer up any real analysis of his works.
   
4. Utterly addictive reading. It could have been twice as long and I’d have enjoyed it five times as much.

*You can use that one. It’s on me.

2.
Despite the detailed rendering and on-the-sleeve classical influences, Stevens’s art manages to capture tiny moments and explore them to great effect. His renderings of his real-life cast are done sans lightboxing, giving them an organic feel that is lacking in most “realistic” art and his hand-lettered dialogue is integrated into the final product in a way that very few cartoonists manage.

3.
His latest book, The Lodger mixes installments of his “Failure” cartoon, drawn for The Boston Phoenix, alongside paintings made during the same period. In (trite-but-true) fashion, it begins with a breakup and Stevens’s move into an old teacher’s home and there’s actually a bit of an arc, even if it’s not blatantly spelled out for the reader and the integration of his fine-arts efforts along with the cartooning create a complete picture of Stevens’s life during that period.

4.
It is frequently very funny, and that’s really the most important thing.

Note: There is the occasional bit of sweary language your mom wouldn’t like.

Related:
I wrote about the first and second print volumes a while back.

Still, $5 for a future magazine that doesn’t litter my floor with those annoying subscription cards and cleverly gets me to look at and interact with advertising? That’s a perfect price point. This is the first issue of Wired I’ve read cover-to-cover in years and I’m pretty sure they’ve got their hooks in me for future installments.

Jean-Philippe Kalonji’s debut graphic novel is meditative and violent, just as it is minimal and complex at the same time. Kalonji’s use of the visual to tell the story aids both the action sequences and quiet passages alike and dialogue that appears in the final text is spare and honed down to a fine point.

Of course it made me think of Akira Kurosawa, but I also saw surprisingly similarities to Moebius in the strength of the artistic storytelling if not actual techniques employed. There’s a flow to the book that’s very much defined by how the full-page panels push in and pull out of a scene, how the art rests on a split second. There’s enough of a link from the way that Kalonji constructs a face and body to the people that inhabit Jeff Smith’s comics that it’s called out on the back of the book, but part of me appreciates the former’s work just a bit more because it’s unafraid of the close-up, the detail shot that can sell a moment more than anything else while Smith (an extremely competent cartoonist) is very much dependent on full figures and traditional comics construction. I’ve not been this invigorated by a debut in a very long time, perhaps since Brandon Graham’s comics first wandered into my baleful gaze.

Recommended highly.

1.
The new edition of Avengers Forever is a beautiful thing with larger trimsize giving Carlos Pacheco’s artwork the room it needs to really hit you. There’s a lot of cute throwaway details, but unless you’re a massive fan of The Avengers and excited about Kurt Busiek’s sometimes-too-neat superhero storytelling being wrapped around a near-incoherent plot involving time travel, Kang vs Immortus (who is also Kang) and something called the destiny force, I don’t actually recommend it.

2.
The praise I’d heard for Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka is very justified. While the quick-and-dirty pitch is “Watchmen for Astro Boy,” Urasawa’s storytelling (which has grown by leaps since Monster, another series I’m catching up on) is nuanced and willing to let the reader work a bit and the emotional beats he hits are a bit stunning, especially considering how much of this work revolves around robots.

3.
Yotsuba&! #6 is likely the comic I’ve looked forward to the most this year, and yes, I know how creepy that makes me sound. Still, despite my inherent cynicism, there’s something so refreshingly irony-free about observing life with Yotsuba and I can’t help but get sucked in and laughing and worrying and cheering for her. It’s a bit like the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer that way — kid-friendly material that works on every level because it’s not aiming at anyone in particular.

4.
Boy, Philip Tan is not the artist I would have followed Frank Quitely with on Morrison’s Batman and Robin fourth issue. He certainly makes some game attempts to match Morrison’s scripting, but they come off as forced versus the effortless way that Quitely packs creatively-laid-out panels with detail and still manages to be readable. There’s a scene where a card is falling from the air and the camera tracks it into Batman’s hands and it lacked a certain kind of alchemy that Morrison manages to do with his best collaborators.

All of this aside, I absolutely love how these comics are scripted and how they play with conventions like titles and credits. It’s sort of the less-formalized version of All Star Superman and it makes each chapter’s inertia play out a certain way.

5.
I’m just going to presume Jeff Parker writes Agents Of Atlas for me and Chris Sims and the rest of you are lucky enough to be along for the ride. The latest issue has a terrific gag centering around a personality implant for M11 just identified as “The Greatest.” I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say it’s a perfect example of how to slip neat asides into your superhero comics without getting bogged down in the too-cute-oh-hey-here’s-a-meme syndrome that some writers fall into.

6.
You’re reading my new comic, right? OK, good.