Next to You — Yali Lin

This is my sadly-missing mini-comic.

I remembered Yali Lin from last year’s MoCCA. I loved the comics I bought from her so I was glad to buy something else. She has a sweetly soft manga-style to her art that’s beautiful and her stories are equally meditative. This is a young woman’s dream where she’s thinking about all the things she needs — mostly simple things, like a notebook, a pillow — only to discover she already has what she needs. The whole thing has a quiet grace that really touched me (I am happy to see it’s online here so I can reread it).

PS Comics — Misty Lewis

PS Comics #4 was my favorite thing from Small Press Expo last year, so I’m delighted to have this collection. Lewis’ characters — who are, for no particular reason other than it’s hilarious and awesome, talking fruit or animals — usually end up in mundanely painful situations. She seems to intimately understand the ins and outs of office life and dealing with roommates. Her humor would still work well if she told these stories using humans, but it’s just that much funnier when they’re Yorkies. Buy this and laugh and then buy copies for your friends.

(It also came with little scratch-and-sniff cards, which were awesome.)

Little Miss May & Her Kitty, Jub-Jub — Patricia Burgess

I picked this up because I liked that Burgess had bound it together with yarn and she was sitting at the table working on crafts (she was sharing a table with fellow comic creator/crafter Megan Baehr).

Little Miss May is an odd fish-looking woman (all of Burgess’ humans have distinct shapes — a neighbor is blocky) who adores her cat, Jub-Jub, perhaps a little too much. Little Miss May faces some devastating tragedies regarding her cat but in the end finds out she’s not so alone in the world.

Burgess tells this story wordlessly (for the most part — there’s no dialogue) through six squares on each page. I liked the format quite a bit — the layout reminded me of storyboards (not surprisingly, Burgess works in animation) and her style is distinctive and fun. She told me this was her first comic and I hope it’s the first of many.

Infandum! Ad Infinitum — Molly Lawless

Lawless has quickly become one of my favorite comic creators and I think everyone needs to know about her. Her style of art is one part realism, one part cartooning with a depth provided by shading. Her faces are open and expressive and really draw me into her stories. She has a playful sense of humor that’s a little self-deprecating but also innocent. She’s a fan of old baseball so some of her comics are about that, which is uniquely fun. Her baseball history lessons have a spirit of silliness about them while still being informative. I am not a particular baseball fan — old or new — but I really enjoyed reading her comics about it.

And since she’s a fellow Arlingtonian, I think we totally need to hang out.

That’s it. The rest of the stuff is longer. I have two anthologies I may put together into one review, but I need to finish them first.