I wrote about two of my favorite comics from 2013, Heather Benjamin’s Exorcise Book and Josh Simmons’s Habit #1, for Zainab Akhtar’s year-in-review series at Comics & Cola.

All my Vorpalizer posts about comics and genre art are now housed at http://seantcomics.tumblr.com and http://seantculture.tumblr.com . Thanks.

A limited number of copies of Flash Forward, my new minicomic with Jonny Negron, are available via Jonny’s bigcartel store. If you’d like one you can buy one for $4.

Michael Hawkins and I have completed BIEBERCOMIC, our comic about Justin Bieber. You can read the whole thing on one page at the link. We hope you enjoy it.

Fantagraphics is the greatest comics publisher of all time. No company, in any field, has made products that mean more to me than Fantagraphics’. Their co-publisher Kim Thompson died too young and took a lot of counted-on revenue with him, so they launched a Kickstarter that’s in its final hours right now. The rewards are almost parodically plentiful, varied, and worthwhile; I’ll be getting a customized pair of Chuck Taylors, naturally. I urge you to give if you haven’t already — it’s basically shopping, not giving, but either way, the company that basically created alternative comics could use your help.

PictureBox is the greatest comics publisher of the 21st century. Any one of several projects published or edited by publisher Dan Nadel would make him and PBox a publisher for the ages: the work of Japanese experimentalist Yuichi Yokoyama or prescient Providence art-comics collective Paper Rad, editing the canon-disrupting classic-comics collection Art Out of Time or the paradigm-shifting magazine of alt/genre comics criticism Comics Comics. PBox also did a huge service for alt/art comics by situating them in the larger context of visual culture — in publishing collections by everyone from Richard Kern to Hipgnosis to the Hairy Who to Destroy All Monsters in addition to the best-ever books by, say, Brian Chippendale and Renee French, Nadel was making a case for commonalities that might otherwise have gone un-remarked upon. Now Dan’s closing up shop to take a more stable full-time job in the book world, so PictureBox is having an inventory-liquidating 50% off sale on everything it sells. I put together a quick list of some of the publisher’s more narratively straightforward works for a friend who was looking for recommendations along those lines.

POWR MASTRS: I suspect this seminal CF series is destined to be forever unfinished, at least in terms of its original conception as an eight-volume epic or something, but it’s basically an NC-17 Adventure Time.

COLD HEAT: Another Unfinished Symphony, though much less dramatically so; in fact you’re better off skipping the final double issue, which makes this weird huge tonal shift away from the rest of it, the rest of it being “What if someone transformed Loveless by My Bloody Valentine into a young-adult fantasy?” Co-creators Frank Santoro and Ben Jones were tentpole PictureBox franchises.

KRAMERS ERGOT 8: In some ways this is the least innovative of the super-duper-influential Kramers anthologies edited by Sammy Harkham, even the least successful, but it’s the most straightforward in terms of the emphasis on nice lengthy narratives from the contributors, and the most thought-provoking in terms of trying to suss out what was included and why, and the coolest-looking in terms of that far-out ’70s science-textbook look.

NEGRON: A great little showcase of the comics and pin-ups of the postmillennial Vaughn Bode.

EVERYTHING TOGETHER: This is a collection of all the short stories by Sammy Harkham, an alternative cartoonist in the grand Fanta/D&Q tradition.

GARDEN: There’s no story here, per se — it’s just a bunch of people in strange costumes navigating an enormous manmade amusement-park-like garden complex and discussing what they see. But Yuichi Yokoyama’s art is just super super appealing to me — he makes every movement seem as dynamic as a Jack Kirby spread, and the overall effect is like going on a strange guided tour of a depopulated Super Mario Galaxy.

It’s worth contemplating how the death of Kim Thompson forced Fantagraphics to crowdfund its continued existence, and how a life change on Dan Nadel’s part shuttered PictureBox entirely. The alt/art comics infrastructure depends on the heroic efforts of individuals; lose them and the loss can rarely be weathered, with the recent shift of the Brooklyn convention currently called CAB to an exclusively Gabe Fowler-run enterprise from one he shared with Nadel and Bill Kartalopoulos being a rare counterexample.

That said, altcomix is very good at rising from the ashes. Tom Devlin’s Highwater Books, the most direct aesthetic antecedent for PictureBox in terms of their books’ high-end design flourishes and signal-boosting of the Fort Thunder/Providence scene, spawned any number of publishers after it folded: Secret Acres and Bodega Books were both founded by former Highwater employees, Devlin himself went on to partially Highwaterify Drawn & Quarterly, and so on. Dan keeping the doors open at PBox long enough to place as many of his artists and projects with other publishers as possible tells you an awful lot about the quality of his character as well. So, we shop, and we hope.

I will be attending tomorrow’s Comic Arts Brooklyn festival at Brooklyn’s Mt. Carmel Church. There I’ll be debuting two books that I wrote: Flash Forward, drawn by Jonny Negron, and In Pace Requiescat, drawn by Julia Gfrörer and inspired by “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t have a table per se, but I imagine I will spend some time selling In Pace Requiescat at table D18 and selling Flash Forward at (I think?) tables U8/U9 or wherever else Jonny winds up. You will likely also find me loitering with my Destructor compatriot Matt Wiegle at table D34 as well. If you’re looking for me, I look like this, so please say hello!

Last week, Frank Santoro interviewed me about the state of comics criticism for his column in The Comics Journal. Frank and I were concerned about the seemingly dwindling pool of people writing substantial reviews of alternative/art comics and all the attendant problems — the still smaller number of women writing about them despite the huge number of women making and reading them, the lack of critical evaluation provided to the newest generation of artcomix makers, the outsize influence of the foibles of those of us who are left, and so on. The interview sparked responses from Ng Suat Tong, Heidi MacDonald, and Frank himself that are worth reading, as are the comment threads attached to all those posts (particularly this comment by Peggy Burns); I also got a lot out of the twitter exchange I had with Sarah Horrocks.

Julia Gfrörer and I will be debuting a new comic at CAB. This is a preview image for it.

Recently on Vorpalizer I reviewed Emily Carroll’s masterful new horror comic “Out of Skin.”

I reviewed William Cardini’s very smart fantasy one-pager “Diana in Ghost Arrow.”

I wrote about being terrified by the poster for Lucio Fulci’s Zombie/Zombi 2.

And I wrote about being terrified by Clive Barker’s Nightbreed but watching it anyway, which is how it became my first real horror movie.

“The True Black,” a short horror comic that William Cardini and I contributed to Josh Burggraf’s anthology Future Shock #4 (buy it here), is now available to read in its entirety on The True Black, my comics tumblr.

I started a new tumblr where I’ll be posting my comics. I hope you’ll follow it.

The inaugural post is a new comic called “Who Cares?”, written by me and drawn by M. Crow. You can read the whole thing by clicking that link. I hope you like it.

The fifth and penultimate installment of BIEBERCOMIC by me and Michael Hawkins has been posted. In this chapter, Justin Bieber encounters One Direction and The Wanted in the Great Grey Room, where they strip nude.

Recently I reviewed Coyote Doggirl by Lisa Hanawalt and Nux Yorica by Cameron Hawkey for Vorpalizer. It’s really remarkable how much strong artcomics work is being made without ever needing touch a single paper page to read it.

Jonny Negron and I made a new comic called Flash Forward. It will debut at CAB on November 9.

Matt Wiegle and I are back on the Destructor beat with a new page from “Destructor and the Jewel of Alpha Mountain.” Sluggin’ it out.

Recently on Vorpalizer, I reviewed Monster Parade by Ben Catmull, Andy by Sophie Franz, and Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin.

I reviewed First Year Healthy by Michael DeForge for Vorpalizer.

I reviewed Illegal Batman by Ed Pinsent for Vorpalizer. This is really some comic.

Once again, I will be attending the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland this weekend. I’ll be moderating the following panel on Sunday at 2pm in the White Oak Room:

Troubling Tales, Difficult Drawings
Effective comics can elicit a number of intellectual and emotional responses from readers. Undoubtedly, some of the most memorable comics have been those which have an unsettling effect that lingers long after the final page has been read. Comics critic Sean T. Collins will speak with Ben Catmull, Julia Gfrörer, Michael DeForge, and Ulli Lust about the intent and methodology behind work that troubles, disturbs and gets under the reader’s skin.

I look like the person in the photo above, so if you see me, please say hello if you feel like doing so.