Rob Clough

Durham

Writer and Contributor at Comics Journal Magazine

Full-time freelance writer. Writes about comics for The Comics Journal, Publisher's Weekly, SOLRAD, his own blog, etc. I review everything sent to me. He/him.

Featured in: Favicon

tcj.com

looper.com Favicon

newsbreak.com Favicon

solrad.co

Articles

The blunt force and furry drama Of Toxic Metal Press

2 weeks ago | tcj.com | Rob Clough

Welcome back to High-Low, a column that originated at TCJ.com in December of 2009. It was originally about mini-comics and small-press comics publishers, but since RJ Casey has the mini-comics part of things covered with his monthly column, I thought I'd focus on the output of specific small presses.
45 Days Of CCS, #9: Ellie Liota, Al Varela and Iona Fox (with Cooper Whittlesey)

Dec 8, 2024 | highlowcomics.blogspot.com | Rob Clough

Ellie Liota has shown a knack, in her young career for drawing anthropomorphic animals, or animals who are intelligent. Trash Town is a fun little comic that plays up both the comedic elements of a group of animals who are dumpster diving with the grim, visceral realities of what this really means. It's a nice art object as well, with a cover flap of a dumpster revealing the raccoon, opossum, and skunk staring up at the reader.
45 Days Of CCS, #8: Hannah Kaplan and Anna McGlynn

Dec 7, 2024 | highlowcomics.blogspot.com | Rob Clough

Hannah Kaplan is someone I hadn't seen in seven years, which was the last time I reviewed her work. I was happy to run into her at the Philadelphia Comics Expo and got a lot of work that was new to me. Kaplan's work is funny, frank, and restlessly smart. The work covered here is from 2017 to late 2022. We're All Gonna Die One Day is in the classic Kaplan style: philosophical diary strips done in colored pencil with an emphasis on sex, friendships, and creativity.
45 Days Of CCS, #7: Jarad Greene

Dec 6, 2024 | highlowcomics.blogspot.com | Rob Clough

If there's a single word to describe Jarad Greene's work, it's focused. From the very first time I met him at SPX years ago, it was clear that he had found his niche doing memoir-inflected young adult and middle- grade comics. While his comics have big supporting casts, the books revolve around his stand-in protagonists. This is especially true for his middle-grade comics A-Okay and his new one, A For Effort.
45 Days Of CCS, #3: Chuck Forsman

Dec 2, 2024 | highlowcomics.blogspot.com | Rob Clough

Chuck Forsman's career has seen a lot of unpredictability. Even his most extreme genre projects were always oddly paced and filled with many moments of reflection. In a fantasy anthology like Snake Oil, the demons had their own side conversations that had nothing to do with the humans they were torturing. In The End Of The Fucking World, the small moments defined the relationship between the two leads to an achingly painful extent.
45 Days Of CCS, #2: Bread Tarleton

Dec 1, 2024 | highlowcomics.blogspot.com | Rob Clough

It's been exciting to track Bread Tarleton's development as a cartoonist. (Full disclosure: Fieldmouse Press will be publishing their book, Soften The Blow, early in 2025.) The writing and concepts have always been there, but Tarleton has notably sharpened not just their drawing, but their entire vocabulary surrounding cartooning. You can see how confident they are now on the page as they start to enter their mature period as a cartoonist.
45 Days Of CCS, #1: Emma Hunsinger

Nov 30, 2024 | highlowcomics.blogspot.com | Rob Clough

If you're a cartoonist and you're trying to make actual money in the profession, it's been fairly well-established that the only genres that are growing and paying real money are middle-grade and kids' comics. Even the young adult genre was long ago oversaturated in the market, especially as more and more young cartoonists have emerged.
You Tell Me Who I Am: Hagai Palevsky on BLURRY by Dash Shaw

Oct 21, 2024 | solrad.co | Hagai Palevsky |Rob Clough |Nicholas Burman

It is a distinct possibility that, given enough time and restless ambition, any artist, no matter their chosen form, will reach a point where they want to focus on the nothing, which is to say, to reduce their depiction of life to its bare essentials and see what emerges.
Adult Drawing: Rob Clough on STAR OF SWAN and HALF GOLD/HALF DUNG by Margot Ferrick published by Breakdown Press

Oct 7, 2024 | solrad.co | Rob Clough |Hagai Palevsky

Breakdown Press has established itself as one of the world’s most cutting-edge comics publishers thanks to their willingness to publish work that stretches, redefines, and challenges our understanding of the formal limits of comics. The oblique, the obscure, and the poetic all have a home at Breakdown Press. All of this describes the two new short comics by Margot Ferrick published by Breakdown: Star Of Swan and Half Gold/Half Dung.
Freak Flags & Flights of Fancy: Rob Kirby Reviews RESCUE PARTY, edited by Gabe Fowler

Aug 12, 2024 | solrad.co | Rob Kirby |Rob Clough

Today’s review from Rob Kirby is co-published with an editorial from former Publisher of SOLRAD and current Publisher of Fieldmouse Press, Alex Hoffman. 2020 was, by all reasonable measures, a top-tier terrible year. The COVID-19 pandemic opened up a Pandora’s Box of disease, death, rage, ignorance, political treachery, and cynicism.