It took a full nine months for this issue to gestate, but Now 11 has at last been delivered, and it's a little bit of everything!  While including some familiar names from across the USA and Canada, #11 is quite the international issue, with amazing contributions from Argentina, Australia, Belgium and Mexico making up over half the page count.  The centerpiece of this issue is Australian artist, Stacy Gougoulis's "Mandorla".  It's 32 pages offer up a philosophically wise and artistically insightful exploration of the ultimately subjective experience of human temporality in a highly informed way that showcases the expressive capacities of comics in a manner that intersects with the work of Chris Ware, Jon McNaught, Eleanor Davis and Kevin Huizenga, among others, but maintains a powerfully cohesive unity of form and content throughout: a masterwork of melancholy.  This story alone is reason enough to pick up this issue, but there are plenty more great comics on hand here from all over the creative map as well as the geographic one!

It’s been a minute, but the new Now has finally arrived!  This lucky thirteenth issue runs the gamut, bringing readers comics from France, Spain, New Zealand, Australia and, of course, the U.S. of A. representing a diverse and far ranging take on the form: from the 24 pages of abstract comics from Cynthia Alphonso to the classic one-page Paul-Schrader-driven gag comics from Nathan Gelgud; from Caitlin Skaalrud's lyrical and sensually drawn pæan to the creative life, “How to Make Comics,” to Stacy Gougoulis’s cooly rational and tightly drawn inspection of the thin walls separating life and death; from Emil Friis Ernst’s Apollonian techno-managerial metaphysics to Ross Murray’s Dionysian family-dynamic disfunction;  a couple signature quickies from Roman Muradov and Steven Weissman, showcasing their pithy wit to Kayla E’s full-on, 1990s-Chris-Ware meta-comics tackling despair with equal doses of rigorous deconstruction and slapstick humor.    In short:  another great issue! Kudos to Eric Reynolds for keeping the torch held high.