Arrivals and Departures — May 2026

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RJ Casey | May 20, 2026

Sometimes you have to get in the car and drive three hours to actively combat anhedonia. So that’s what I did on the morning of May 2nd, trekking along the coast of Lake Michigan to make it to this year’s Chicago Alternative Comics Expo. I was near ecstatic when the nice lady at Google Maps told me I’d reached my destination and there were two free parking lots in front of me. Parking lots! Good lord, what a windfall. The vibes were high as I strolled into the Irish American Heritage Center, a heavily-tiled building that was surely once a middle school. I immediately clocked a gift shop selling corded sweaters and a large banner of Nolan Ryan. I rubbed my hands together. It was comics time.

The first artist I made it a point to stop at was Nicole Rodrigues, who I’ve been a fan of for years, but had never met. I’ve mentioned Rodrigues a few times in “Arrivals and Departures” and her work often looks like it should adorn the outside of a glazed vase. The Sacred Egg is her brand-new one, an enigmatic Altered States-esque twelve pages of risographed interdimensional sex. Rodrigues twice uses transparency paper here, making the reader physically hold down the hallucinatory watercolors over the linework like a lightbox. I appreciated the added surprise of a tactile element.

Next I ran into Chicago stalwart Jeremy Tinder who has just printed the second issue in his Lostronaut series. I say this with affection: Tinder’s comics are not going to light up the scene, but I bet they’ll be reread dozens of more times than any flash-in-the-pan that garners that sort of hype. Lostronaut is about a dreadfully lonely, big-eared cutie exploring barren planets in the name of science and staving off solitude. They are low-stakes comfort comics full of silly sci-fi for a more refined palate.

If memory serves, Marnie Galloway and I tabled next to each other at TCAF 2012. We’ve kept in contact since then and she creates the only comics my wife likes to read. The digest-sized perfect-bound Snake and Raccoon continues Galloway’s mighty investigation into child-rearing and I will confidently claim that no one draws and writes about parenting with more grace. The more ad-libbed “get it all on the page” nature of Snake and Raccoon opens up Galloway’s style a bit and makes for her funniest work to date. I’ve been a stay-at-home dad for five years and am champing at the bit to turn the page and get onto the next chapter of my life. But these stories make me think back and say, “Hey, maybe that wasn’t so bad and I’m actually not dead inside.”

At one end of the exhibition hall there was a wooden bar that was about a kilometer long. Unfortunately, the taps were cordoned off. It was getting a little stuffy in there and I could have used a glass of lukewarm Guinness (or “mother’s milk,” as I like to call it). I ducked out to sit in on a panel discussion that featured two artists I fancy: Jim Terry and Dave Ortega. If I was in charge — I know, I know — there might have been a second stab to make the title “Say Less: Succinct Storytelling Strategies” a little less of a tongue-twister, especially after the nice volunteer greeting the room pronounced it “Suck-int” and I had to bite my cheek to keep from giggling. (The ONLY other time in my life I acted immature was in the audience at a panel in a Wizard World in Ohio. The panelists had slowed down and kindly asked if there were any questions from the audience. As if on cue, someone near the front row audibly farted. My friend Ricky and I had to speed-walk out of that situation.) Back to the panel! It was nothing to write home about aside from that Vincent Lau seems like a star-in-the-making.

After the panel I promptly went to his table and picked up Pace of Play, a minicomic Lau made in response to Major League Baseball’s pitch clock. Over nine pages, Play documents one at-bat between the Angels and Mariners — the players, the mascot, the hot dog vendors, the announcers idly discussing Avatar 2 — that really makes you feel romantic about the game. By forcing the reader to slow down and speed up with masterful pacing and paneling, Lau takes on the Sisyphean task of documenting the passing of time while also reveling in the minutia. This story is simple, it’s meaningful, it instantly belongs in the upper echelon of all-time sports comics.

Tom Spurgeon used to come up to me at comic shows and whisper, “Who do I need to see?” Then I would take him to two or three tables and introduce him to younger artists he wasn’t familiar with yet. I have officially crossed over because now I’m asking that of the youngs. I am that guy now. I queried three different people I trusted and they all said: Mili St. John. When the people talk, I listen, so I purchased the book making its debut at CAKE called And Up They Sprung. I don’t remember feeling so overwhelmed and enthralled with a cartoonist’s sheer ambition in quite some time. Here we have an artist referencing Dore and Milton with oligarchs stoking the flames of hell with A.I., lawsuits, and their massive thumbs on the scales of labor. Through time-line hopping and alternating two-or-three-page vignettes, St. John uses the relationship between Satan and Beelzebub as well as an estranged daughter and her Big Tech CEO father to tell a modern parable. Sprung isn’t so much about good vs. evil — I think that would prove to be too easy for St. John already at this point — but taking on more prickly issues like the parallels between a holy war and class war as well as data centers and churches. There is so much to take in here, so many different page layouts, so many big ideas, so many allusions, that it makes me think of another artist who was no stranger to devils. William Blake wrote, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” I don’t know if Mili St. John would agree, but that may be beside the point. I’m just so happy to see an artist go fucking balls to the wall.

Comics are The Best because at one show you can buy an all-maximalist-everything book then walk five feet over and pay for another that revels in deft minimalism. I introduced myself to Richie Pope, who I've admired from afar since his 2016 “Fatherson” issue of Frontier and he said he recognized me because I was wearing my standard uniform of a Chicago Bulls shirt. There ya go! Modern Housing is from late last year and contains short (4–8 panels in length) tales of residential horror. The main attraction here is Pope’s confidence when it comes to negative space and the texture he achieves in his line. Housing plays up the idea of the landlord as a domestic specter, haunting tenants but then becoming ethereal nothingness when a problem needs to be dealt with. The narrator gets retribution at the end, knocking the landlord out cold behind a grocery store, but we all know that’s a temporary solution. He’ll be back, rattling his chains, at the first of the month.

I’m going to make this one quick, probably to Drew Lerman’s chagrin. Conversations with Don DeLillo is a new niche nerd-lit collection put out by Cram Books of my favorite ongoing comic strip. In it, Lerman walks around with DeLillo and a handful of other luminaries of the written word and the punchline is always them telling Lerman, very gently, how much they enjoy his comics. The repetition tickles me and this one’s already on my short list of favorite comics of the year.

When I was a young child I lived close to a two-story comic shop called Graham Crackers. I would beg my dad to take me there all the time and when he did occasionally cave, I would spend the whole time there holding my breath around cardboard standees of Vampirella and Evil Ernie before picking out issue #37 of some Batman or X-Men offshoot series I’d never heard of. Those comics, where even the “In the Previous Issue…” page was incomprehensible, made me feel unstuck in time. Redman by Cam Collins exists completely in that space. Redman, an imp-looking character with no discernable features other than black expressionless eyes and a cape, takes on villains like Hot Shot (“The Invader of Home Kitchens”) and a slug woman who wants the workers at a factory to slow down so they can’t complete the robot they’re working on that week. He saves the day by seemingly making them into Redman too? These are like if Rory Hayes made Shonen. I didn’t understand any of it. I want to read more.

The award for Most Gregarious Zinester at CAKE goes to… Ivy Rose! We had a couple nice conversations after never having met before and I credit her pleasantness and energy to having the table directly next to the door and that modicum of breeze. Luckily for me, who grabbed her collection Handsy, her comics are also a breath of fresh air. This book is made up of very raw classico-style black-and-white autobio short stories. Several of them tangle with very real tragedy and Rose slips in and out of her alter ego, for lack of a better term. Sometimes she draws herself as a traditionally cartoony human with long eyelashes and a gap between her teeth. Other times, when by herself and her thoughts in the moment, she’s a plain bright-white round-headed figure reminiscent of those on restroom signs. While maintaining a level of confession we’ve come to know and love from the genre (don’t roll your eyes!), Handsy sets itself apart by asserting a daydreamy quality to it all, and, dare I say, optimism.

Slap a bunny logo on me because, this month, I’m cruelty free! See you at next year’s CAKE, I hope.

Questions, love letters, and submissions to this column can be directed to @rjcaseywrites on Instagram.

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