Please Destroy My Enemies by Michael Sweater

This one is confusing me - it looks like a webcomic, but I'm pretty sure it isn't.

Michael Sweater published a zine called Lion's Teeth - on paper, as far as I can tell, in the manner of the Olden Times - probably mostly in the early Teens. (He also seems to have been using the name Mike King at that point, or swapping back and forth between the two names.)

Silver Sprocket published a collection of those strips in 2016 as Please Destroy My Enemies, which Sweater described in a short biographical note at the end as "mostly stuff he forgot to scan." (Meaning he didn't put it up on Instagram, I think.) A second edition of that book came out in 2018, adding color; that's the version I just read.

It reads like a webcomic - mostly three- or four-panel one-off strips in a rounded cartoony style, without continuing characters for a long time before an unexpected stretch in the middle about a boy Charlie, his dog Boobie, and his dad. It has the rhythms of a gag-a-day strip, though with a cluster up front where I wasn't sure if they were supposed to be funny. (As opposed to thoughtful, or interesting, or just quirky.) There's a couple of other short sequences as well, before the end, but I didn't see any recurring characters or situations.

It's also a small book - 56 pages of comics and a few more of related material - and I think small-format as well, though I read it digitally, where all books are exactly the same size.

It has the energy of a young cartoonist and the scope of a creator trying out different things - jokes, viewpoints, character ideas. Sweater is - or maybe was - a tattoo artist as well, and that influence is clear in the bright colors of this version, his rounded crisp lines, and the characters who "read" visually very quickly.

The bottom line when reading a first collection of anyone's work is: would you want more of this? And my answer here is: Yes. His bio note mentions "over 1000 pages" in Lion's Teeth, and I'm wondering if I could find that stuff somewhere other than a random small-press expo - since I'm unlikely to go to one of those but I would like to find a bigger batch of stuff by this guy, whatever name he was using at the time.