Summer Pierre's Carrington's World

This slender mini by Summer Pierre, Carrington's World, was nominated for an Ignatz Award in 2022. Pierre's clear-line style that allows just a bit of sketchiness is simply pure pleasure for me to read, especially when her comics are published in color as they are here. While Pierre is known for her pleasantly insightful memoir work, the comics I like best from her are what I call "autobiographical biographies." Thoroughly researched, and often using primary resources, these stories are not only insightful in their analysis of the subject and highly informational, they also offer up a glimpse into qualities that Pierre treasures most. By revealing what she admires to the reader, she often gives a clearer picture of herself than with conventional memoir comics. 

In this case, the subject is Dora Carrington, an artist in the famed Bloomsbury Circle in England that included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and others. Initially thought of just as the companion (?) of writer Lytton Strachey, she was also a painter and illustrator whose work was discouraged by a prominent critic. Pierre carefully untangles the sexism endemic to the era from the genuinely quirky (and likely neurodivergent) behavior of both Carrington and Strachey. Pierre's charming cartooning got me invested in caring about the life of this artist I knew nothing about before I read this comic, and her imagined encounters between these people is part of that charm. Pierre's lettering is also highly attractive, and alternating white lettering on a black background for the captions with black lettering on colored backgrounds in the panels and word balloons added weight to her authorial voice while strongly differentiating it from what she imagined these people were saying. 

Above all else, it is Pierre's delight in the ilustrated letters of Carrington that is the highlight of this story. She asserts that Carrington's caricatures and drawings that went along with her writing revealed a budding cartoonist. She imagines Carrington thriving in putting out quirky, funny minicomics that she might have enjoyed--and then inserts a micro-mini comic into the comic itself! I could read an entire volume of Pierre writing about other artists. The only thing I lamented in this comic was that Pierre needed a proofreader, as there were multiple spelling errors. Otherwise, Pierre followed her storytelling whims to some delightful places.