Arrivals and Departures — June 2026

I asked ChatGPT to help me write this month’s introduction and it said… 

Man, can you even imagine if I was that much of a sniveling loser? Here are some fresh reviews.

Cryptid Corner (I Know What You Did Press, 2025) by Parker Davis

Dammit. 

I ended last month soaring, on a true comics high, feeling positive about all the striding cartoonists and the state of zines currently being published. Then I made a huge mistake. I read Cryptid Corner. Davis has reached the rock bottom of ironic nostalgia and, in over 200 perfect-bound pages, kept digging. Cryptid Corner is a post-Paper Rad, post-Adult Swim, post-South Park graphic novel told entirely in digital square single panels that makes me feel nothing less than post-lobotomy. I can keep harping on what this book has come after, but I also can’t help feeling it’s just in time for today’s age of “brain rot.”

art from Cryptid Corner (I Know What You Did Press, 2025) by Parker Davis

Kevin and his girlfriend keep hearing mysterious scratching outside their house so he heads to the cryptid message boards where others share their stories of footsteps, slithering, rustling and whatnot. Davis wastes a few dozen pages of this book to show you Kevin at his computer, text on a black screen with his reflection faintly in the background. All the images in Cryptid Corner appear to be reusable digital assets and shapes repetitively placed on top of each other. Signs and other ephemera seem to be hand-tracked with a mouse in Kid Pix or typed out in Comic Sans. I’m doing a lot of critical speculation here mainly because the effect loses its novelty after around three pages making me not really give a shit at all. Kevin befriends a gas station attendant with permanent snot running down his nose after he shares a similar monster sighting experience. This man also has a gun, and thus begins the main conflict. PTV is the message board moderator, a man who tries to convince Kevin that violence isn’t the answer and he should embrace cosmology. He says, “the creature is an outward manifestation of your interior reality.” PTV is an intellectual — you can tell by his glasses. While the Gas Station Attendant pushes Kevin to purchase something high caliber to blow the spectral being away , PTV takes him on a road trip that leads to something of an exorcism full of low-brow reference comedy electronically constructed by a poor poor poor poor man’s Jacob Ciocci. I wouldn’t accuse Davis of talking down to his audience, but more like working down to give a knowing nudge to what he perceives his audience to be. And that isn’t me.

 

Bigfoot Business Shoe (Breakdown Press, 2025) by Josephine M.K. Edwards

This comic is a yalp of frenzied angst, told in cursive. This comic is a testament to grotesquerie and vigor that puts Edwards in the same crabapple family tree as Carel Moiseiwitsch and Krystine Kryttre. This comic is about a woman’s first day on the job. We follow the lady — in a ponytail and power suit — as she has trouble entering her new office building. She is immediately leered at by a dead-eyed man, a co-worker and superior of some sort. Edwards uses black and white with neon green highlights throughout and shapeshifts the anatomy of the characters to fit the vibe (bad!) and mood (stressed!). I knew I was in for something staggering when, early on, Edwards spends two whole pages focusing on walking up a short flight of stairs in high heels. 

To get personal for a moment, I have had horrific times on airplanes in recent years, especially red-eye flights. My head pounds while also feeling like it’s floating away. If I move to stand too fast, it feels like I might pass out, but if I move too slow I might double over and puke. Although not being about air travel whatsoever, Bigfoot Business Shoe artistically, hilariously, and accurately captures that very horrific feeling, when one wrong move — one wrong thought, even — feels like it can incite every molecule to fall from your person. Is this what it's like now entering the work force?

 

art from Bigfoot Business Shoe by Josephine M.K. Edwards

After becoming vaguely reptilian, the new employee is subject to several patriarchal supernatural humiliation exhibitions. Here’s where she meets a couple of swamp women who Edwards draws as porcelain dolls constructed of wisps of smoke and hair. They proceed to drown her (little tadpoles/clones of herself escape out her mouth), dry her skin, then out of the skin, make handbags, vests, and human masks. You know, everything needed to succeed in a male-dominated Brooks-Brothers-adjascent company. Unlike a large swath of books, comics, and movies right now, Bigfoot delivers because Edwards lets the protagonist be self-conscious and anti-social, feel degraded and spiteful, without any therapy language to ground it. There’s no trauma talk here, no self-help lingo, just a stroll through a chaotic shitshow without a fishhook to gently pull the reader back onto land. Eventually some angels up above rip some beyblades causing a minor apocalypse while the capitalist vermin flee in a golf cart. The only lesson learned here is that Josephine M.K. Edwards makes comics that are abject power punches right to the throat.

 

Vore-Tex by Emily Zimmer

This is fun. I’ve been doing this column for a while and I’m still finding scene- and context-free comics, books by cartoonists I’ve never heard of before, and ones that look like Mat Brinkman’s take on Dear Dumb Diary at that!

Zimmer draws the main character, wide-eyed Robin, with a stretched torso in a buttoned-up flannel shirt. A creature that looks like a cross between a Dalmatian and a sleep-paralysis demon rudely interrupts her on the phone and informs Robin that there’s a destructive vortex opening on the side of Evil Mountain. It doesn’t take much convincing for Robin to follow this quadruped to the scene, drawn all scratchy and severe, and take it head on. Zimmer leaves pen-to-paper mistakes in or simply scribbles them out. Remnants of notes are occasionally left in the margins at the bottom of the page. I appreciated the intensity. Sometimes you gotta rage in the cage.

 

art from VOR-TEX (self-published, 2026) by Emily Zimmer

With every panel numbered (52 total, for those keeping score), we follow Robin as she gets to the heart of the mountain and learns of The Machine, which harvests souls. With a little bit of clanging around with a wrench and some clever coding, Robin transforms The Machine into… something more murderous? There is a level of horror/fantasy here that you have to surrender to and Emily Zimmer is sure channeling something substantial, but isn’t quite there yet in terms of narrative communication or harnessing the ideas traveling from brain to ink to page. Vore-Tex is a hard one to pin down and define, but I’m sure of one thing: I’m glad I found it. It’s life affirming in that it exists, Emily Zeller exists, I exist. Aren’t comics great? Well, at least some of them.

Sometimes when I read submissions to this column I’m on the couch and my son is playing keepy-uppy with a balloon in the same room. If the balloon gets close, I’ll hit it with the comic and he yells, “Book whack!” That’s a perfect description if there ever was one of what I’ve been doing here for years. See you next month, I hope.

Questions, love letters, and submissions to this column can be directed to @rjcaseywrites on Instagram.

 

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