Aron Nels Steinke, self-published There are many ways Big Plans is no better than the autobiographical mini comic your hipster roommate used to crank out. Parts of it are embarrassingly slight. Boo hoo, the author went to a comic store with no Fantagraphics books. If he couldn’t draw, he’d have to go home and blog [...]

Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Fantagraphics It’s probably impossible to review any single issue of Love and Rockets dispassionately or even fairly. The weight of twenty-five years’ worth of Love and Rockets comics lends every new issue a weight and depth it cannot produce on its own. The extended continuity is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes oppressive, [...]

Johnny Ryan, Fantagraphics Everything bad that you’d care to say about Angry Youth Comics is true. It’s repellant, racist, juvenile, mindless, repetitive, and pornographic, and I can completely understand why someone might absolutely hate it. I love it. Angry Youth Comics is living proof that a bad joke repeated often enough becomes funny, and a [...]

Douglas Wolk, Da Capo Press Look, this is a comics review column, not a book review column, so I’m only going to mention in passing Douglas Wolk’s new book of comics criticism, Reading Comics. It’s divided into two sections: in the first (“Theory and History”) he says everything I’ve always wanted to say about comics [...]

Peter Kuper, Crown (Random House) It is a truth universally acknowledged that the only thing worse than hearing one of your friends brag about his acid trips is hearing two of your friends brag about their adorable baby. Similarly, the only kind of autobiographical comic I dread reading more than the teenage drug fiend story [...]

various, Friends of Lulu So apparently girls can read comics. If this sentence absolutely blows your mind, or if it fills you with such delight that you are now doubled over with mirth, you will probably want to read this anthology. Anyone else can skim. Because comic after comic here, feature tedious gender stereotypes trotted [...]

Leslie Cabarga, ed., Dark Horse Unlike some of the other children’s comics that are currently being reprinted–notably Carl Barks’s Duck stories and John Staley and Irving Trip’s Little Lulu–the Casper comics are not good in any traditional sense. They are perfectly serviceable children’s stories, but there’s no reason for a grown-up to read them. Comparing [...]

Thomas F. Zahler, Maerkle Press Shock Value: Either B+ or D Love and Capes is either the driest parody in the world of comics, or it totally sucks. For the life of me, I can’t tell which. It’s billed as “the heroically super situation comedy comic book, and this is no lie: Love and Capes [...]

Here at Indie Comics Roundup, we dispense praise and blame on independent comics according to the Incredible Hulk #185 scale. In this scale, Incredible Hulk #185 is considered to be the average comic (a solid C), and everything is graded based on its deviation from the average. Since Incredible Hulk #185 contains a Glen Talbot [...]

So here at Indie Comics Roundup we’ll be looking every month at a selection of the independent comics that have come out over the last thirrty days or so. “Independent” is a misnomer here, of course, since technically Lady Sex Hole is independent and Gilbert Hernandez’s Sloth is published by AOL Time-Warner; but we all [...]