On my last LCS visit I saw , and bought , Drawn & Quarterly's OPTIC NERVE #12 , the anthology series/franchise for Adrian Tomine .
It cost $5.99 , 40 pages and an " odd " cover , which sort of emulated the " half- " covers that newsstand editions of Harpers' and The New Yorker put on in addition to their regular covers , but unlike those ones this one didn't duplicate the cover under...not at the back either , and , if you did tear it off you would lose 1/2 of the last story in the title...
The last ish of this I recall getting was like the penultimate installment of a long story , but , as I indicated?? , there were 3 , complete , stories in this one , in a mixture of b&w and color .
I sort of missed much of the age of <cough> " alternative " cartoonists' material being packaged in standard comic-book form and being sold in " regular " comic-book shops and one of the three stories in this one , in fact , somewhat touches upon that...
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...There are 32 pages of comic-book story , all told , plus the covers and some " design element "/title pages , that plus a 2 pages letter column .
The lead-off story recalls Dan Clowes' recent WILSON , as it too tells a " real world " story not only in comics , but formatted in traditional newspaper strip form...This time in consistent 6/1 daily/Sunday structure with the Sunday more or less (but not perfectly) summedup by the Monday !!!!!!!!! The size of the (b&w) dailies sort of recalls 1930s strips , the (color) Sundays essentially strips of then , too , if shrunk to funny-book size...
I believe the last issue got Emerkeith was part of the story that was later reprinted in a trade as Shortcomings.
This particular issue I thought was pretty good, but I don't think it was 6 bucks good. Then again if it continues to be years between issues it won't exactly break the bank.