Optical Sloth

New review today for Dexter’s Digs #2 by Chris & Gin (Chris and Ginger Ludden). More reviews tomorrow if all goes well!

New review today for Autobiographical Conversations by Ryan Claytor, and maybe reviews will be back to normal this week? I’ll go with probably. Either way, this is the last week of SPACE exclusives, as mailed review comics are starting to pile up too, so I’ll go back to my random comic reviewing next week. Yep, another exciting peek behind the curtain on how I pick the comics to talk about…

Work has blown up yet again, and if you think it’s been bad recently, keep in mind the I work at a Board of Elections in Ohio, so it’ll get a lot worse next year. Anyway, if all goes well I’ll be able to put together a few reviews before the end of the week, if not I’ll try to get some extras up next week to make up for it and to try and get through that SPACE pile. Oh, and my fundraiser is closed. Good to know that that was a bad idea, but I’m shooting to get to England myself for that convention next year anyway, assuming that I can save enough.

New review today for Not Dog #2 by Amalia Degirolamo. And fine, one last plea for money to get me to England for that comic convention. Please note that I gave an inflated amount to begin with in the hopes of a perfect trip; at this point I’d happily go for less than half of that ($2000 should get me there with enough money to at least buy a few comics). If I get a tiny amount of money (which seems optimistic at this point) and can’t afford to go, that money goes right into buying comics that I’ll review here, most likely from John Porcellino and his Spit and a Half shop. Anyway, I’ll let this sit here through tomorrow and will be back on Friday with a final update for the week. If this fundraiser goes down in flames I’ll just start saving so I can make the trip next year.

More SPACE comics! New review today for Doctor Cat in Professional Cats by Sarah Sobole. As you may have guessed from that title, it features cats!

Back to the SPACE comics! New review today for Snow Day by Sequoia Bostick. If all goes well it might even be a regular week of reviews around here, meaning 3-5 comics. If things go really well it’ll be more than that, as I have lots of SPACE comics to talk about. Oh, and my stupid fundraiser is still going on for the next few days, so give me all of your stupid money. Or some of it, anyway. And it’s for the good cause of sending me to England for a comics convention where I will spend all of your money on comics, which I will then read about and talk about here. It’s the perfect system!

As you may have guessed by the lack of updates since Tuesday, work has once again gone crazy. Technically I’m at work right now on Saturday (it’s fine, I’m on a break). So I apologize for the lack of updates, in theory I’ll be able to put more up next week. In the meantime, why not check out the archives of some of the people I inexplicably missed at SPACE this year? Brian John Mitchell has a ton of comics reviewed here, you could kill an afternoon looking at his stuff alone. Or there’s Jeff Zwirek, or Chris Monday, or Max Ink, or Suzanne Baumann, or Pam Bliss, and it’s just now dawning on me how many quality comics people I didn’t see last weekend. I really must have had heat stroke. Oh, and my fundraiser is still going on through the end of the month, although at this point it’s farcical to call it a fundraiser, as it’s not raising any funds. But if you’re rich and want to read about comics in and around England, you still have another week to help get me there! On the other hand, if the overtime keeps up at this pace I might be able to fund my own damned self…

More SPACE goodies, so a new review for A Pantomime Horse #3 by Ben Passmore. Fundraiser still going on, I’m in a rush so you’ll have to scroll down a bit to find it if you have money burning a hole in your pocket that would be better spent sending me to England for a comic convention!

That’s right, an actual update! SPACE was a lot of fun, even if I had heatstroke and had just finished working my 20th day straight, so my apologies to the artists if I seemed mildly insane. My apologies to the other artists that I missed entirely, as I swear that there was either a secret room there or I was even more out of it than I thought. Anyway, all SPACE comics around here for the next few weeks, and today it’s Mean Goat Adventures #1.5 by Kris Lachowski. Oh, and the least fundraisingest fundraiser ever is still going on through the end of the month, at which I will put us both out of our misery and throw in the towel. It’s to send me to a convention in England so I can buy lots of their comics and then come back here and tell all of you about it. I think it sounds like fun, if maybe an odd idea for a fundraiser, so if you agree with me throw some cash my way!

This overtime thing at work is still going on, so I’m mostly posting this to remind people who are anywhere near Columbus to go to SPACE. It’s basically right across the street from my office this year, which is handy, as I’ll be working all day Saturday. Oh, and my fundraiser to try and get me to England for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival is still technically going on, but with how that’s going it’s safe to call it a bad idea at this point. Still, I’ll keep it open through the end of the month, just in case some eccentric millionaire decides that he wants to read reviews about comics exclusively from the area around England for a few weeks for a change.

No new reviews right now because things are oddly busy at work, so it’s all overtime all the time for me. Which is good, as maybe I’ll be able to afford that possible trip to England without having to rely on anything from this gofundme campaign. Turns out that maybe you have to have a social media presence to have these types of things work, huh? Or, conversely, that the people coming to this site to read about comics are as broke as I am. Anyway, if you do have any extra money lying around and would like to nudge me in that direction, you have the rest of the month to nudge away, then I’ll have to make up my mind one way or the other. Thanks, and new reviews whenever all this overtime stops! In theory it’ll be just in time for SPACE in Columbus next weekend…

New review for Losers Weepers #3 by J.T. Yost, and I’m still doing that fundraiser to get me to England for a comic convention in October. It’s been less than a week and I’m already sick of begging people for money. How does NPR put up with this sort of thing?

New review today for Kumayama Mountain, 1993 by Graeme McNee. Also the fundraiser to send me to a convention in England in October is still going strong, by which I mean that you can still be the first person to donate if you hurry! I did make it clear that if I get some money but not enough to go then I’m just going to spend what I do get on comics, right? So that they’ll be reviewed here? Circle of internet life and all that.

New review today for Smallbug Comics #6 by Charles Brubaker. Also I’m doing a fundraiser through the end of next month at gofundme, hoping for enough cash to get me over to England for a convention in October. I have no idea how such things are supposed to go, but it’s off to a slow start, maybe because I started a fundraiser in the summer, when everybody has free time and no money to spare. Yep, a master businessman, that’s me!

Well, it’s finally happened: I have joined the ranks of people on the internet asking for money. I’m using GoFundMe and am trying to raise enough cash to get me to the Lakes International Comics Art Festival in Kendal, England in the middle of October. I lay out the whole reasoning behind this at the link, but basically I’ve always wanted to go to an international comics festival and have been informed by a few people who send me comics from the U.K. that this is one of their better small press comic conventions. So please, if you enjoy this site, or if you appreciate discovering new and random comics through me, could you help me out? If it’s at all possible for you, that is, as I know that some people don’t have the extra cash to help out with things like this. But I don’t have a social media presence (and I’m certainly not going to start one purely for a fundraiser), so any help you can give me in getting the word out would be greatly appreciated, and that doesn’t cost anything. I’ll have to buy a plane ticket and find lodgings by roughly the end of July, and if I don’t end up anywhere near my goal then I will spend whatever money I do get on comics for review anyway. Thanks for your time, and back to the regular reviews on Monday.

New review today for Irene #4 by various artists, and I just noticed that if you buy two volumes of this anthology at their website that you get $5 off the cover price. Not a bad deal!

New review today for My Life in Records: Hell’s Bells by Grant Thomas. Grant also has a sale going on through his website at the moment for 30% off, but it’s only through the end of the month. So if you’d like to catch up on his comics, the next week would be the perfect time to do it!

New review today for Past Coasts by Jon Drawdoer, who has kind of the perfect name for an artist.

New review today for Cringe: An Anthology of Embarrassment by various artists and published by Birdcage Bottom Books. Happy weekend everybody!

New review for Against the American Dream by Matt Reints, which is mostly about Dusty Rhodes and not some long political comic against America.