Arrivals and Departures — October 2026

“Welcome to another episode of Subway Takes. So what’s your take?”

“Comics anthologies should never, ever have a theme.”

“100% disagree. I mean, most of the anthologies awarded the Eisner Awards over the last decade have had a very straightforward theme. It’s usually right there in the title.”

“Yes, exactly! They are winning for that simple theme — how easy it is to digest — not necessarily the quality of the work.”

“Mmm. Are there any themes that are acceptable to you?”

“If a good editor can capture a moment, if they can organically meld the stories submitted to them into some sort of electric throughline — those are the only ‘themes’ I’m interested in.”

“OK, OK. I think I understand…”

“I don’t want to be spoon-fed uninspired short stories! And all for the sake of a zeitgeist-y motif or charity function! Anthology readers are discerning and smart!”

“100% disagree.”

And scene! Here’s another anthology round-up where the reviews will be broken down into categories: MVP of the issue, biggest surprise, and my bottom-line final thoughts.

Night Shift, edited by Kelly Froh

This one, put out by the Seattle comics festival Short Run, feels good to hold in your hands. The cover, the paper stock, the dimensions are all tactilely and aesthetically appealing. Each story is one or two pages long and — although a little too heavy on “I’ve been watching the news lately” autobio — finely skirts that line between serious topics and frivolous ones. It’s stated on the inside front cover that the artists featured in Night Shift range from age 18 to 72 which is wholeheartedly inspiring and, inadvertently or not, sets the bar for all other anthologies out there.

MVP: Two things are true. Lara Kaminoff is so immensely talented and I’m frustrated there isn’t a place like Nickelodeon magazine still around to publish work like this. These couple pages offer a brief glimpse into the life of a disgruntled gargoyle tender, waking up at 3 a.m. to scrub the cement beasts. With a long hat and surly face, the stout supervisor uses a bit of elbow grease all while the sculptures offer pointed criticism, or is that just his interior monologue? With each panel looking like a lost cell from an Eastern European cartoon from the ’70s, here’s hoping that this is merely an hors d'oeuvre for what Kaminoff is cooking up next.

BIGGEST SURPRISE: “Michael” by Gil Rhodes has a funny concept although it’s made even funnier by the inking, believe it or not. Drawn like Graham Annable losing his faculties (and I say that as laudatory as possible), Rhodes tells a short story using narration and erratic linework about a man who desperately wants to be social, yet is hamstrung by a child-sized doll in his possession. The wavy, inconsistent line density constructing each panel border makes it feel like this two-pager is a house of straw, mirroring the fragile mental state of its subject.

BOTTOM LINE: There’s a positivity to it all that I think can be boiled down to what everyone in comics knows already — Kelly Froh has the ability to bring out the best in people. If I need a mid-week “change your face” attitude adjustment, I’ll be returning to Night Shift.

Do You Like Me?: A Romance Anthology

Each of the four contributors in Do You Like Me? get a decent chunk of pages to expound on the theme of love. I’ll accept it.

MVP: Ross Jackson seems unable to make a bad comic, especially when he focuses on his cast of Floridians and all their adolescent fumbling and fickle pheromones. But the real MVP here is Molly Lecko Herro, who I think on some days may be the best cartoonist working right now. In “Love Bites,” a big-headed bandanna-ed sailor comes across a castaway. Sitting upon just a bump of an island and seemingly made of iridescent jello, this distraught survivor asks for help in finding her husband. After locating her homeland, a knotty black wolf comes out of the forest and begins gnawing on the jiggly head of the mysterious traveler. The two pages Herro takes for the slow-burn reveal that the wolf is in fact the missing spouse are unnerving and libidinous. I wouldn’t confidently claim that “Love Bites” is the cartoonist’s best work, but even when Herro isn’t working at full strength, it’s still better than 98% of all other comics out there in the entire world.

BIGGEST SURPRISE: It’s genuinely staggering when risograph printing is utilitarian and not just a cutesy postscript (or way for people to crank up zine prices exponentially?). What ties this anthology together is that all the stories share the same palette — shades of red, pink, and white. You know, the love colors.

BOTTOM LINE: We should be accustomed to Molly Mendoza providing beautiful pages. However, her contribution could have been titled “McDonald’s Origins: Mac Tonight.” There’s one more story that tested my aversion to goth/sci-fi/fantasy mish-mashes, but it held the line before concluding. All in all, we’ve got another winner. I’m beginning to believe Secret Room Press out in Portland can bring the heat when it wants to.

Death Spark #3, edited by Thomas Campbell

Campbell, the “ComicsBlogger,” proves once again that he is a man of taste and discernment. This third edition of his flagship anthology gets contributors from all over the globe; places as far away as Portugal, India, and Missouri; and gives them the latitude to bring their best or sally forth toward the outer confines of their burgeoning styles.

MVP: What happens you are incapable of the only thing you are designed to do? What’s there to say when everyone else is muttering their mundane workaday complaints and you’re dealing with the uncertainty of your identity? Ana Margarida Matos tells a fascinating story about an anthropomorphic nose that can’t smell a thing. It’s drawn in a way with symmetric tiles, train tracks, and drop-in panels of smart phone screens that give the natural absurdity of it a more clinical feel. The best part is the intermingling of hand-stenciled caption text on the bottoms and tops of the page with the computer font drop-shadowed word balloons inside the panels.

BIGGEST SURPRISE: Let’s keep the lettering party going! Louka Butzbach inks repeated dots coming from her cat character that encircles its thoughts. Phoebe Mol draws thin word balloon tails that feel like creeping ivy or sentient eyelash hairs. They add an element that just takes her grotesque baroqueness up to another level. The bubbles of modified cursive in Pris Genet’s contribution are plopped down on the page wherever they will fit, making the lettering immediate and intense, anchoring the story itself. And that’s just in the first three stories.

BOTTOM LINE: What makes Death Spark such a terrific anthology is that artists are working with a vast diversity of influence and style, still the quality control is firmly maintained.

Working Cartoonist, edited by Angela Fanche, Dan Welch, Max Burlingame, and George Olsen

As the great Kiwi Jr. once said:

Nothing really changes around here / Everything is out of my price range

Well! The proposed New York Working Cartoon Library is attempting that change. A group of cartoonists, including all of the editors of this anthology, are attempting to raise $100,000 for a N.Y. storefront that will house a free-to-the-public comic library and venue space. I’m just a lowly western-Michigan-dwelling bumpkin and that number makes me break out in hives, so let’s move on to the fundraising anthology itself.

MVP: There’s a great one-two punch of trypophobia in Working Cartoonist. Sarah Kirby has four pages about being entirely engulfed by larvae and Chaia Startz adds one page about a bug crawling in her pores and taking up residence in her brain. They’re both disgusting, but make me feel something, which isn’t always the case for the rest of what’s in here. However, the MVP award unanimously goes to Swayam Parekh. Telling an autobiographical story about pet-sitting a cat might feel out of place next to the East Coast avant-garde nonetheless Parekh knocks it out of the park with her unique sense of narrative rhythm and mastery of shading and texture.

BIGGEST SURPRISE: I was surprised by the good-not-great of it all. I’ve read the majority of these 20+ cartoonists before (and raved about several of them in this very column), so I had high hopes going into this anthology. Many stories were half fleshed-out or seemingly pulled from a past sketchbook/Instagram, resulting in an out of time, out of place, out of context feeling. This was most evident in Ashton Carless’s “White-Moon Rocks.” Carless had previously made a fan out of me with his ability to draw his panels with a dreamlike haze while keeping his storytelling grounded and specific. In his contribution here, each page brings us closer and closer to a meteor drifting in space. Perhaps aimless was the objective.

BOTTOM LINE: My very own expectation gap notwithstanding, Working Cartoonist gets a solid B. Good luck on this lofty endeavor. Getting good comics into as many hands as possible is a worthwhile intention.

Decent reviews across the board. Courage takes many forms. 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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