Now revamped with more pages and higher quality reproduction, The Comics Journal continues to be the most wide-ranging and critically astute magazine about contemporary comics and cartooning. This issue features a cover interview with Ivan Brunetti, a cartoonist known for his caustic, scabrous, and self-lacerating comic Schizo as well as the cartoon collection Haw!, as well as his comics contributions to anthologies and illustration work in such magazine as Mother Jones, The Baffler, and Entertainment Weekly. Brunetti discusses his particular brand of misanthropic humor in an interview with Journal editor Gary Groth. Underground comics are highlighted this issue in two major features: Patrick Rosenkranz, the author of the underground comix history Rebel Visions, provides an historical profile of the major underground publishers — Gary Arlington, Don Donahue, Ron Turner, Denis Kitchen, Don Schenker, Bob Rita, and Fred & Kathe Todd — in a long essay based on interviews with all the participants. Second, his own book comes under the knife in a series of critiques of his own history of underground comix by the underground cartoonists he covered in the book itself! Plus our columns covering European comics, manga, newspaper strips, and other facets of the medium, industry commentary by Steven Grant, Dirk Deppey, and others, investigative journalism, letters, a full color reprint of a rare, archival comic from the 1950s, and a word or two about George Bush and Martin Heidegger, all in the most iconoclastic and unorthodox magazine about comics in the world.
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