Writing In Recovery: Kevin Budnik

Kevin Budnik is yet another cartoonist whose work has focused on autobiographical diary comics. Unlike most of them however, Budnik's quotidian observations frequently have a great deal to do with his recovery from anorexia and anxiety. He's been a prolific cartoonist throughout his illness and recovery, and three recent minis show Budnik using a variety of approaches in presenting his story. In Flower Grow, he republishes a number of strips first seen elsewhere. In this comic, Budnik experiments with color, using what looks like colored pencil. A number of the strips veer between past and present, giving a glimpse of his life in the form of emotional conversations, witty observations, a road trip, and hard talk about how he and a friend were so very different. It's a sort of emotional narrative, especially in the way that Budnik strings strips together that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other in a conventional manner; he creates that connection by way of proximity. As a young twenty-something, Budnik frequently touches on the idea of being an adult and how far removed he feels from being grown-up. From things like buying suits to the weirdness of attending weddings, this comic depicts him as being betwixt and between identities and states of health.

In Old Gum Wrappers and Grocery Lists, Budnik collects a couple of years' worth of diary comics, presenting them in chronological order. These comics are most like his first collection, Our Ever-Expanding Living Room. There's a lot more attention paid to single-page/single-panel drawings and observations as well as more attention paid to his daily schedule. However, Budnik never feels obligated to stay leashed to the Kochalka-style four-panel daily diary (usually with a punchline or conclusion of some kind each day). Instead, these comics "sound" more like John Porcellino's work. It's less poetic than Porcellino's comics and generally more direct, but many of his musings are just that: free-form thoughts that, over the course of the book, cohere to form a separate, more interesting emotional narrative. There are occasional dates, there is work, there are walks and bike rides, and there are also several emotionally charged conversations with friends. Knowing the entire context of these encounters isn't what's import from Budnik's perspective, only that there is a lot at stake emotionally and that everyone speaks from the heart. If there's an occasional sense of tonal sameness and repetition at times in this collection, that flaw is mitigated by Budnik's unflinching honesty and willingness to admit that he frequently feels confused, depressed and without any steady sense of being moored. Recovery isn't discussed a lot in this collection, but it remains an underlying theme that pops up unexpectedly. That's especially true when Budnik struggles with his tendency to isolate himself, and much of this comic simply sees him using what's known as "opposite action" to combat this unhealthy behavior.

Hand Book #1 is a short mini that addresses his recovery head-on. Working in full color, Budnik looks back on old journals and comics he did while doing the work of recovery. From the slightly uncomfortable sensation of understanding that people were happy to see him at a party because he hadn't been out in public for months to detailing the many OCD rituals that at once gave him comfort and trapped him to revisiting the feelings of loss of control and body discomfort he faced when eating, Budnik treats each emotional piece with a sense of restraint and respect. There's a scene where he thinks about looking in a closet and finding a measuring tape with which he measured his waist, and the present-day sense of revulsion he now feels. Budnik struggles with the idea of relationships, his own self-worth and freaking out that he's no longer at the vanguard of youth culture ("It blows my mind that there are 19 year olds.") He ends on a scene where he recalls being confronted at his extreme skinniness, denying that there's a problem. Each page is a gut punch, but Budnik is careful to space out the harder blows with more amusing and benign observations. Each of these three comics is designed with different impacts and ends in mind, and Budnik stays true to his sense of authentic engagement in each one.

Chicago Week: Linework

11/11/2017: Please note that references to Andy Burkholder have been redacted due to multiple reports of him being connected to sexual assault.

Linework is a student & alumni anthology from Columbia College in Chicago. As befits a student anthology from one of the cartooning capitals of the world and with a great cartoonist like Ivan Brunetti as a faculty advisor, Linework is unusually strong and coherent for student work, and each issue has grown bigger and more ambitious. The magazine boasts strong contributions from its alumni, including the likes of Onsmith and Lilli Carre', along with recent grads like Nick Drnaso, Kevin Budnik and [redacted]. Let's go issue by issue and highlight the most interesting work in each one.

Linework #1, edited by Onsmith, Madalyn Merkey and [redacted].

[Redacted], Onsmith and Budnik are three of the anthology's cornerstones, though Drnaso would contribute remarkable work in the next three anthologies. He hadn't yet developed his mature style in his submission here, and it shows in the way it's a bit of a muddle. Budnik's self-flagellating strip is more in-your-face than his later, gentler style, echoing the work of David Heatley. Onsmith's strip about two kids finding a dead cat is brutal and then turns a magnifying glass on that brutality. He has a way of getting at the white trash living experience and its shocking and casual embrace of violence but is also empathetic enough to delve into the minds of these characters.

There are a number of fine stories by artists with whom I was not already familiar. Kyle Harter's "After These Messages" features a man who can only relate to others in so far as they remind him of television; the cartoony line and the use of TV sets as panels is clever. Rachel Duggan's reminiscence about her father telling her about his rough childhood was fascinating; her rough line and use of colored pencil gives the drawings a child-like quality, even as the stories she was told were entirely inappropriate for children. Kiyomi Negi-Tran's piece comparing the way she relates to her mother to the way she relates to her boyfriend is bracingly honest and heart-rending. She makes great use of color in splitting up her story and uses the cute super-deformed style of character design to powerful effect.

Marc Filerman's "Sasha" is strongly derived from Chris Ware's design style but does have a funny punchline. Jonathan Wilcox's narrative about a man buying increasingly fancy clothes and accoutrements and then getting mugged works because of the small panels, the rhythm of the grid and the simplicity of his character design. Regina Rotondo's "Family Gossip" strip, on the other hand, works because of the idiosyncratic way she draws characters and settings, though this was a story whose impact was blunted a bit by its use of color. Joyce Rice's strip about the hell of working in a convenience store and the desperate need to get out is aided by its mostly steel-blue monochrome approach, which helped to sell monotony. Finally, David Alvarado's strip about a brain on a desert island is whimsical and well-drawn.

Linework #2, edited by Kevin Budnik, Nick Drnaso and Max Morris.

Alvarado switched styles and this time around went for larger panels and figures and brighter colors, though his characters maintained a primitive quality that dovetailed nicely with the weird, gross-out gag about hallucinagenic chicken nuggets. His other strip, about a man who dies on a camping trip, is even better, as it screws around with time and narrative using a beautifully clean line. Budnik eschews dialogue entirely in a detailed strip about exploring an abandoned, wrecked house that nonetheless carries emotional weight and strong connections between its two characters. Joyce Rice contributes a strip where the main character's brother has just died, and she uses a surprisingly bright color palette to get at the weird and conflicting emotions surrounding the event. Drnaso's strip about a depressed clown is staggering; the first page is depressing because of the clown's attempting to buy into corporate while discouraging his son (after it's too late); and the second is just a total meltdown in front of kids. Drnaso has mastered his clear-line style and uses a cheerful palette that belies the darkness of his work. Betty Heredia's strip about her compulsive needs to get and peel away scabs is not only compelling and disturbing in equal measure, it's even philosophical, as she asks what she's doing is self-mutilation if it gives her pleasure. The stark and simple black and white and the small panels move the reader from image to image quickly, as she's less interesting in dwelling on specific images of torn flesh than she is in exploring how she gets there.

Filerman's strip about eating cat food as a child and vomiting is funny and weird, especially as he ties it into the anxiety of being punished by his father. Rachel Duggan's sketchbook drawings are excellent, reminiscent of Eleanor Davis' work. Claire McCarthy's "Robert" is a cleverly-design series of small anecdotes about a local homeless man that's surprising in some parts and sadly predictable in others. Angela Caggiano's "House on Lombard" is designed to look like a photo album in her tribute to her grandfather; the character design and overall presentation reminds me a bit of Carol Tyler. Michelle West's "The Receiving End" is crudely drawn but sharply conceived, as she relates an amazing roommate horror story that's also hilarious. Liz Gollner's smoothly-rendered story about a pilot crash-landing and losing his memory makes skillful use of greys and a restrained, fragile line in its tiny panels. It's in many ways a more traditional comics story than most in this anthology, but it's artfully done.

Linework #3, edited by Kevin Budnik & Nick Drnaso.

This is probably the best all-around issue of Linework, thanks in part to contributions by Brunetti and Carre'. Still, the students and other alum acquit themselves quite well here. Both of Drnaso's features are strong. The cover features four cheerleaders, and the flaps tell their life stories, with selected images from their lives charted to a graph that measures "happy" or "sad" over time. It's an ingenious idea that's well-executed. "Chatter" is a far more low-key effort, as Drnaso transcribed an interview with someone who placed a "Missed Connections" ad and drawing it as though the two of them were sitting across from each other. The level of awkwardness he achieves with body language belying speech is remarkable. Alvarado hit on his preferred style in this issue: flat color with Ben Day dot effects. That style allowed him to get really weird, as one strip features a kid making an impromptu sex doll whose face he accidentally tears before completion, and the other strip features two weird kidnappers and their obsessions while navigating the fate of their captive. Both strips offer strange and brief glimpses into their characters with a unique and powerful visual presentation.

Matt Novak's hilariously awkward story about mangling sex-related language as a youngster is another highlight, especially thanks to the crudeness of his line. Brunetti's autobiographical story about coming to terms with diabetes is typically excellent, as he manages a remarkable level of detail in a strip that's supposed to be stripped down. Equally good is his profile of designer/artist Alvin Lustig, a restless fellow who succumbed to diabetes. Budnik's story about crushes is more in line with his current, confessional style, and the use of black & white and a more restrained line allows him to inject more emotional power into his drawings. Carre's panel-less story about forgetting someone's face is fascinating, as she shows a drawing slowly mutating into something recognizable after twenty iterations. It ends by talking about how only the present moment is at all recognizable. Onsmith similarly contributes a strip about the mutation of form in the face of comfortable tedium, employing those sharp and askew angles that disorient the reader.

There are many different visual styles at work in this issue. Michelle West keeps it simple with another horrifying encounter with a neighbor in "G String Man"; she really has a way of working up disgust and contempt in her strips. Max Morris' "Tsar Bomba" is a color-soaked account of the microseconds that go by in a nuclear blast and what happens to skin, buildings and bones in the process. Heredia's dream about a freeway that becomes a rollercoaster is sharply angular and claustrophobic, and it winds up being about finding out how to let go. Filerman's gender-bending space opera is over the top from the word go, using his simple character design, bright colors and a rhythm that doesn't let the reader ask too many questions to push it along.

Linework #4, edited by Marieke McClendon, Erik Lundquist and Pete Clodfelter.

The fourth issue switched to an entirely new editorial team and got even bigger. Alvarado's strip about a couple running over a man in a furry suit is hilarious and unsettling. He has a way of starting strips and throwing a monkey wrench into a very particular and defined set of social interactions and expectations. Budnik's strip about the "Mayan apocalypse" is typically thoughtful and smart, as it addresses his obsessive need for ritual. Ryan Duggan's gag about tattoos, "Permanent Solutions For Temporary Problems" is well-drawn and hilarious. Joyce Rice's "Hoosier Valley" finds the artist in peak form in this slice-of-life teen comic that cuts close to the bone with regard to the way relationships and friendships can suddenly shift and implode. Her use of color enriches the reading experience, especially at the end when one of the characters takes a long look at the night sky in awe and wonder.

Brunetti's strip about fearing he might have oral cancer is neurotic, self-obsessed Brunetti at his best; the panel where his head swells to dwarf his body is especially funny. Sam McMorris' strip, "The Adventures of the Oblivious Sexual Conqueror" is hilarious in its depiction of awkwardness around the opposite sex; the verisimilitude of the dialogue is especially painful, while the cartoony style allows him to warp faces and still keep the strip recognizable. Onsmith's bizarre strip about a man made out of paper who has a phone inside of him that is used to call a help desk is both funny and unsettling, primarily because of his angular drawings and the slightly sickening color palette he used. Matt Novak's tremulous line gives his strip about being dumped, finding a slightly unstable person for a rebound relationship and learning that he had a brain aneurysm both a humorous and emotional sense of resonance.

Drnaso is once again the biggest stand-out. His "Play Pen" is a masterfully created, subtle and unsettling story about a police officer who deciphered a seemingly innocent toy catalog and realized that it was peddling children for sex. There's a level of detail that's almost mundane, reflecting the nature of the investigation, but there's also a level of nausea in this strip that's palpable. Other strong strips in the issue include Betty (credited here as Beatriz) Heredia's strip about encountering an old man, a crow and a chair that caught her foot when she went inside. Her brush really went wild in this strip even as she continued to use small, cramped panels to maximize that sense of being trapped, even when outside.  Chris Dazzo's strip about an awful roommate is cleverly constructed ala Chris Ware, where the drawing is meant to be looked at panel-by-panel as well as a single gestalt. Pete Clodfelter's manic, detailed drawings and sense of the grotesque are enabled by the sickly orange-yellow color scheme he employs. Max Morris' Gary Panter-stylings and musing on punk get at the heart of the "now" nature of the music and scene and how quickly disposable it is. Sanya Glisic wavers between sharp angles and grotesquely melting flesh in a story about escape, confrontation and change.

Every detail is considered carefully in the anthology. Even details like endpapers (a clever visual call and response between Drnaso and Budnik) are given maximum effort. Not every entry is of interest, but it's been interesting to observe the evolution and improvement from issue to issue, because every artist is obviously trying to pitch their "A" material as much as possible. I think by this time the tradition of the anthology has created a culture of excellence and pride surrounding it, with every new editorial team trying to outdo the next.

Chicago Week: Kevin Budnik, Nick Drnaso

Kevin Budnik's first book, Our Ever Improving Living Room, one of the earliest releases from young publishing company Yeti Press. It recorded what is a rite of passage for many young cartoonists: doing a daily comics diary for a year. While wobbly at points, it retained a remarkably strong comic voice (Budnik was committed to turning anecdotes into gags with recognizable beats and rhythms), but it also hinted at deeper issues. Those deeper issues are explored in full in the floppy-sized series Dust Motes (two issues to date), also published by Yeti.

Budnik's strips deal with his incipient and worsening depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and eating disorder. An early Halloween strip where he declares that "I still can't let go of childhood" as a 23-year-old man is a telling one, as he seeks comfort in old patterns and rituals with his family. Many of these strips are painful and uncomfortable to read, especially since Budnik simply lays them out cold without any other sort of context. He'll go from a contemplative strip to a funny strip to a strip where the relationship between him and his long-time roommate starts to show strain because of Budnik's increasing OCD behavior and anxiety. The way he starts withdrawing from his friends is evident when he reluctantly goes out after gleefully planning a night of solo TV watching. His initial rage when his family shows concern about his eating habits melts away when he can see his heart beating through his now-skeletal chest.

Budnik also delivers snippets of the path to recovery. There's a remarkable four panel strip that alternates between his physician and his therapist, as they deliver a crucial speech regarding understanding how eating disorders provide a means of control for people who feel they have no other form of control over their life. The therapist talks about anxiety-driven thoughts, the pathways they create in the brain, and how to reroute them. Budnik has to go through rejecting his difficulties being "bullshit problems" and accepting them as both something that can be overcome (not the end of the world) but also something that is troubling him in particular. The recovery is slow and painful, though Budnik starts to emerge a bit from the haze of depression to want to create again. More of the strips regain a sense of whimsy deep into the second issue, like a strip about whistling (either to show happiness or one's skill at whistling--no other reasons!). There are difficulties with friends (including a series of brutal texts at the end of an argument from a friend, and another friend weeping when she sees "how not OK you really are), problems with his family and urges to worry about calorie counting. On the whole, he's able to appreciate friends, work and art  again and understand both the struggle that he came through and how much work maintaining those gains is. All through, his cartooning is excellent; a simple and slightly cartoony line influenced in equal parts by Charles Schulz and Ivan Brunetti (his mentor). He adds a delightful sense of detail and clutter to his panels that neither of those cartoonists employed, and by not varying line weights, he creates an atmosphere where both character and background have equal importance for the reader. That comes in especially handy when he draws scenes outside.

Budnik has co-edited the Columbia College anthology, Linework, with fellow alum Nick Drnaso for a few years. Drnaso is a remarkable young talent in his own right. His Oily comic, Young, Dumb & Full of Cum is one of the most hilariously downbeat bits of autobio that I've ever read. Drnaso uses a clear-line style that is given a sense of weight and dread by his unsparing spotting of blacks. "How To Dress Up As Me On Halloween" is a vicious bit of self-critique regarding his cynicism, negativity and self-pity, all while delivering the darkest of punchlines. Other strips, like "The Wonder Years" offer devastating critiques of high school and its essential sexism, all with the driest of wits. Dnraso's wit is not unlike Brunetti's, but his formal techniques (he loves the grid) echo those of Chris Ware. In another Oily comic, Tell God To Blow The Wind From The West, Drnaso uses a 911 call taken on 9/11/11 to create a grim, terrifying comic. It's made all the more effective because throughout the comic and its unyielding four-panel grid, we never see people; instead, we only see rooms and buildings. The cold, almost sterile quality of the drawings belies the desperation mixed with mundane problem-solving of the transcript.

Autobio Minis: Park, Budnik, Jordan

Mumblecore Comix, by Kevin Budnik. I enjoyed Budnik's debut, Our Ever-Improving Living Room. This mini collects some four-panel, frequently downbeat gag comics that he did for Columbia College's student newspaper. It's the same basic beat in every strip: a depressed looking couple plaintively look away from each other as they get off a quip that's sometimes goofy, sometimes absurd and sometimes sharp-edged. One of Budnik's best assets as a cartoonist at the moment is his sense of comic strip rhythm. He knows when to set up a premise, how to pause a beat or two (usually with silent panels) and then deliver a punchline. Even the strips that don't have great punchlines or are just very silly work because of that sense of rhythm and timing. Budnik also adds just enough detail to get across his points but not so much as to distract the reader's eye. Indeed, many of the strips are guided by tiny positional changes of small lines in the faces of the characters. The use of color filled up lots of empty space and prevented that from being a distraction, as well as adding to certain punchlines in the strip. This was a short mini and I found myself wanting to read more.

Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream: Autoptic Mini, by Laura Park.These look like sketchbook drawings from Park, piled into a mini and looking beautiful on every page. Park somehow manages to combine the spontaneity of a sketchbook drawing with a level of detail and craft that make looking at every one an absolute. Despite details like intense cross-hatching and detailed backgrounds, the strips are nonetheless loose, expressive and funny. One of the keys is her consistently delightful self-caricature, which exaggerates her size and shortness. Those glasses she wears and the way she draws her hair give her a powerful, iconic appearance on the page. Even when she's being shy or recovering from surgery, her caricature dominates every panel. Despite the level of detail she provides in every panel, the reader's eye is drawn to Park herself on the page. The strips here range from single panels to groups of related single panels to fully developed narratives. Park isn't shy about sharing the most intimate details of her life, but she always manages to play them for laughs. "In The Mood For Love" is about her needing "to get laid today" and the efforts she goes to in order to try to do so. "Lazy Laura: The Idling Idjit" and "The Days Feel Long" are about trying to work alone as a cartoonist and managing the intense back pain that would later presumable lead to the back surgery she alludes to later in the comic."If You Want Something Done" is about her epic quest to get to a bathroom without wetting the bed as she's recovering in the hospital. Her comics will soon be collected by a big name comics publisher, but she told me that she will continue to release new minicomics through Tom Kaczynski's Uncivilized Books. I imagine Park will receive a lot more attention when that book does come out.

17 Weddings, by Robyn Jordan. I've only read bits and pieces of Jordan's work in the past, but I found it to be witty and expressively drawn. This mini has a killer premise: single page accounts of memorable moments from 17 weddings she had either been a part of or attended. This is the Jesse Reklaw model of autobio that he uses so effectively in Couch Tag, wherein focusing on a particular detail often sheds light on larger issues that are brushed off to the side. Jordan starts with her flower girl days, where she was delight to receive an Alf watch after being bored for hours at the ceremony. Other strips talk about ridiculous dresses, school friends she no longer has anything in common with, arguments with boyfriends at the wedding ceremony, the embarrassment of seeing people she knew when working a catering job at weddings with her mom, hooking up at weddings and one hilarious strip where a guy came out before the wedding to announce that the couple was not going "to parade their solemn vows before you" rightly raising the question of why they were even there. Jordan's strip about her own wedding focused on the malfunction with her "chicken cutlet bra": pads that stick to one's breasts with adhesive. She ends the mini by simply yanking them out and going "free and easy". Jordan's loose, spontaneous line highlights her character design and understanding of physical interaction in space. She reminds me a bit of Ellen Forney in that regard, going from dot eyes in some panels to more naturalistic close-ups as the situation dictated. This is a clever and well-conceived bit of autobio that doesn't outstay its welcome.

Diary Comics: Azzopardi, Budnik, Delporte

Our Ever-Improving Living Room, by Kevin Budnik. Budnik was a student of Ivan Brunetti's at Columbia College in Chicago, and there's a clear link in sensibilities between the two cartoonists. Budnik turned a one-week diary comic assignment into a thirteen-month odyssey that helped him refine his style and slowly unlock the parts of himself he really wanted to start talking about. The format is the classic James Kochalka four-panel structure--four beats, every day. Budnik's style couldn't be more different from Kochalka's, however. In terms of his character design and tone, Budnik is a cross between Jeffrey Brown and Charles Schulz, and I don't mean that lightly. There's an incredible sturdiness in each and every strip, as Budnik carefully thinks through certain events but creates the rhythm of a four-panel strip with a punchline. What's interesting is that he arrives to the project almost totally fully-formed as an artist. Sure, he refines his line and his storytelling over the course of thirteen months, but it's subtle things like using a slightly thinner line and perhaps different tools. He also chooses his background details more carefully, and the result is a more consistent-looking strip that leads the eye exactly where Budnik wants it.

His figures are slightly ragged like Brown's but immediately recognizable and even iconic, like Schulz's. More to the point, Budnik immediately creates his "There goes good ol' Charlie Brown/Oh, how I hate him" moment with his first strip. It starts almost as a parody of the tedium of diary comics, as he checks off the things he does when he has the apartment to himself: take out the trash, do the dishes, vacuum the rug...and "cope with horrible loneliness". It's a great joke, one that's reprised near the end of the book, and it's made even funnier by the way he draws himself in the "loneliness" panel-laying naked in his own filth on the bathroom floor. That's very much a Brunetti sort of moment, but Budnik is actually more reluctant to completely spill his feelings at all times. Having a daily diary comic, however, has a way of getting at information that's otherwise hard to express, and so it comes to pass that he lets slip that he really is seriously OCD. That occurs in a strip where he tries to downplay being called OCD, saying it's an overused and misused term...but that he really does think something bad will happen to his family if he doesn't do certain things.

Overall, this is an incredibly strong first work. Budnik gives voice to his loneliness, his wanting to connect but often feeling uncomfortable with others, nostalgia for a comforting childhood and difficulty accepting adulthood. Somehow, amazingly, he comes up with a punchline every day and a strip that's just a solidly-constructed read. His work ethic and how seriously he takes this project shows on every single page; there's never a sense that he's blown off a day or gotten lazy, even on days when he's not inspired or nothing of interest is happening in his life. He's self-deprecating without being pathetic, open without giving away too much of himself right away, and most of all possesses a sense of self-awareness that is both a blessing and a curse. This book was published by RJ Casey's Yeti Press, yet another small publishing concern that's releasing excellent work. I hope they will publish future volumes from Budnik, who continues to do autobio comics.

Journal, by Julie Delporte. This is a very different sort of diary comic, in that it starts right after a serious break-up. The mother of a friend of mine, when talking about break-ups, once said, "Don't ooze out, get out!"  Delporte is very much in "ooze" mode throughout this comic, seeing her ex-boyfriend regularly even as she no longer lives with him. She also tries something different with this comic; instead of using her usual black & white style, Journal is done entirely in colored pencil. One can even see the tape on the pages where they were originally shot, giving the whole book a sense that it was constructed as much as it was drawn. Unsurprisingly, Delporte does a lot of soul-searching throughout this volume, as she moves from Canada to take up a residency at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. If Budnik's book was about him grappling with loneliness but wanting to connect, Delporte's book is about her struggle with her desire for connection when she knows that relationship would never work, no matter how much she still loved her ex-boyfriend. She also struggles with the concept of adulthood and living a life without a particular structure or sense of rhythms.

The result is a series of incredibly beautiful pages, as her color sense with the colored pencils is bold and dynamic--almost like what a child might draw, only with a firmer grasp of structure and harmony on the page. Her looping cursive script is as beautiful to look at as her images, and it's done in the same colored pencil as her drawings. Journal is an account of a journey where she moves two steps back for every step forward emotionally, where a bad week follows a good day, often with an almost embarrassing amount of intimacy. It's also her attempt to understand the difference between sadness and depression and whether or not she needs therapy, an attempt that is ultimately left unresolved. She tries to work through her feelings and insecurities quite literally through work--drawing the journal. Unlike Budnik, her journal eventually starts to have diminishing returns and she returns to a more "hidden" life, to use her term. It's clear that in the epilogue, writing the journal had a powerful and positive effect on her, but it was time to let the actual contents into the world and then forget about them. As one would expect, a book published by Koyama Press looks great, as the key to its success is the brightness of the color contrasting with the sadness she feels while evoking childhood delight in drawing.

100 Days of Winter, Nine Months of Beige, and Eight Tablet Dream by Sean Azzopardi. Azzopardi is a bit older than the other two cartoonists discussed here, but he's still grappling with many of the same issues. In particular, the thorny notion of "growing up" haunts him in these accounts of stress, moving, diseased pets, medical issues and time spent with friends. Azzopardi discusses his battle with the skin disease psoriasis at length, detailing his mixed feelings about submitting to a drug regimen that cuts alcohol out of his life. At the same time, he notes how much worse his life could be in terms of health. Azzopardi is in his forties and is single with no children, which brings about those sorts of self-recriminations, the sort of thing that Tim Kreider refers to as "The Referendum". That's where we measure ourselves against the typical and expected societal goals like owning a house, being married, having children, etc vs the current reality. It's a question many artists have to ask themselves repeatedly throughout their lives, especially when they doubt their own abilities.

Nine Months of Beige is a more loosely-drawn journal that's less about specific dates than it is about places and spaces, and trying to come to terms with both as one's age advances and it's harder to be part of a scene. Azzopardi's drawing really takes center stage here and includes some funny drawings about having one's hands in the air at a party, having one's hands in the air on the tube, and improbably doing a "rave" at work. I love Azzopardi's square-headed, bespectacled self-caricature, complete with receding hairline. Eight Tablet Dream is about self-recriminations and the feeling that he is bad at everything: bad at being a friend, a worker, a brother. It ends with Azzopardi having grappled with all of these feelings (as well as loneliness) and coming out the other side intact with an artist's sense of wonder. His drawing is also quite excellent here, especially with regard to depicting exaggerated emotional states and outdoors scenes.Azzopardi's comics have a certain poetic quality on many of the pages as he's given to direct musing about his life in a manner that's different Budnik and Delporte.