Video store clerk Darla Vogel is fed up, until one of her customers, a precocious home-schooled kid, offers her some of his meat-tinged candies. Darla takes a plunge down the rabbit hole into a surreal world of throbbing, veinous buildings, compulsory public nudity, weird creatures and more. If William S Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, H.P. Lovecraft and Harvey Kurtzman had a mutant lovechild, it might resemble Bob Fingerman’s bold new confection, Connective Tissue. Fingerman, a cartoonist and novelist best known for an acclaimed graphic novel (Beg the Question, a Gen X classic) and an acclaimed prose novel (Bottomfeeder), merges the disciplines in Connective Tissue, a genre-bending and medium-mixing work best described as a fully illustrated novella.

Hoping to further increase his irrelevance to the esteemed world of graphic novels and thus cement his status as “former cartoonist,” the saturnine Ivan Brunetti (author of the acclaimed Misery Loves Comedy and editor of Yale Press’s two essential Anthologies of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories) has compiled HO!, which collects the vast majority of his morally questionable, aesthetically confused—and absolutely gut-busting—“gag” cartoons.Culled mostly from out-of-print work (Hee! and Haw!) and other anthologies, the contents are discreetly presented in an uninviting, funereal package of unglamorous black and white. Hopefully, this will keep the impressionable, young, and faint-of-heart unintrigued and at a distance, while those who appreciate a touch of the gallows in their humor can enjoy an uncomfortable chuckle or two before the merciless thumb of oblivion grinds us all into less than dust.HO! further cements Brunetti’s reputation as the contemporary king of the gag cartoon, a sentiment echoed by noted comedian Patton Oswalt (The King of Queens, Comedians of Comedy) in his introduction.