Jim8Ball's Carnival of Comics This could be the best deal in mini-comics: 25 black and white minis with color covers packed into a circus-inspired box for $20. Feast your eyes on this: I sat down and opened this box of minis from Jim Coon over the weekend, expecting to find a handful of good minis and a pile of stinkers. No such luck. I smirked and laughed my way through almost all of them, except for a three issue series called Super Soap that just didn't do it for me.

Jim's art is professional and deadly consistent. He's been making his own comics since the Reagan administration, so the consistency is understandable. But it's still nice to see that each of these minis are so solid. Most of them are quarter page format, with a few eighth of a page size ones thrown in. I started with the smaller format and a couple of them were my favorites - It Came From the Sea and Robot vs. Alien. Both of these 16-pagers are heavily indebted to the monster movies that Jim and I probably both grew up watching and both feature single panel per page layouts with captions telling the story.
I also really enjoyed the five-issue series Tail of the Tomcat Samurai. This felt a bit like Stan Sakai's awesome Usagi Yojimbo series, but Jim's tongue is a little firmer in cheek than Stan's. Each issue has a "to be continued" drop that makes you wonder what's about to happen next. Issue two has a particularly heinous surprise for Meowki San aka the TomCat Samurai. These eight-page minis are packed with shifting panel structures and an abnormal amount of action.

Lola and the Spaceman is probably the simplest of these minis, but it's also one of the best. A spaceman lands on Lola's planet and the two of them fall in love. Unfortunately spaceman's oxygen tank is limited. Poor Lola just wants to help her new love, but sometimes love hurts... This one is wordless, but Jim does a great job of showing the two character's emotions as the story unfolds.
Get more information at Jim's blog. He has multiple deals on this page, including a slightly risque mature audience pack. I would suggest the Robot and Monster Pack for $4 for starters. You can buy individual comics or any combination at his Etsy store.

Urgent Telex by Hurk Hurk's, er Lord Hurk's 44-page mini-comic Urgent Telex is a handsomely outfitted comic with screen printed covers and cool graph paper endpapers. Inside you'll find three stories and a few one page pinups. The best story is the creepy and colorful, "Glass Chops." A redneck type fellow sends his teeth off to hunt some pigs in the forest, but the teeth, who have morphed into little sentient creatures, find out that the pigs might be one step ahead. The longest story, "Bozak the Space Dictator," is less engaging (maybe after the technicolor glory of "Glass Chops" it couldn't be helped) but gets points for effectively lampooning our chimp of a an ex-president George Bush . Hurk's art is expressive and fun. Often it brings to mind some of the better work in the now defunct Nickelodeon Magazine. I especially enjoy the use of the benday dots in his backgrounds.

Hopefully, copies will be still be available a Hurk sent this in for review ages ago. Check his blog, website, and he's even got an Etsy shop. Definitely check out these posts on his blog of his latest work, The Odd Hour Presents.

Folk Issue #2 by Tyler Stafford The second issue of Tyler Stafford's Folk is visually engaging and whimsical. Over 20 pages, Tyler tells two stories on pages of alternating colors. For some reason, the transitions from yellow to green colored pages are the most jarring. Of course it doesn't help that the thread of the story is something that reminds you a bit of a hallucinogenic trip. "The Hunt" is a hunter becomes the hunted story that channels some of Jim Woodring's Frank. Tyler packs these densely landscaped pages with imaginative and otherworldly flora and fauna. The setting in "The Crystal Ship" switches from woodsy and dense to lunar and angular. Tyler doesn't drop as many details in this story, but you still get something like this: Check out the little guy in the mid-to-upper right of the page that has the vacuum tube thingy. Have no idea what's going on there, but I like it.

Folk issue two is on sale at Tyler's Etsy shop for $2.50. You can also see some additional page scans. Also check Tyler's website for more information.