First Second: Lucy Knisley's Something New

Having followed Lucy Knisley's career closely since her first book, I've at times felt both drawn to and frustrated by her autobio comics. On the one hand, she has a beautiful, clean line that grabs the reader and doesn't let go. She's witty and knows how to tell a story. The problem, as one friend of mine noted, is that she didn't seem willing or able to "spill some ink", to really find a way to express some deeper emotional truths without coming across as privileged. Trying to get a grip on precisely why her comics haven't worked for me, I thought to compare them to Gabrielle Bell's own travel comics. The reality is that both women are not wealthy but have had some amazing opportunities to travel that most people don't have because of their capacity as artists. In Bell's case, she's an outsider no matter where she goes, so her reportage always carries a fish-out-of-water element that still allows the reader to get a sense of place. In Knisley's case, her travelogues are often bogged down by her feelings about being in a place (usually about how awesome it is, or else complaining about some details about an otherwise amazing trip) getting in the way of actually conveying an experience to her readers. She also has a way of spelling out what she thinks are the themes of a work that feel superficial or contrived.

The main exception to this is Relish, which is autobiography told through a love of food. By concentrating on food and letting the autobiographical details flow in around that tight focus, Knisley was far more successful in conveying the importance of relationships in her life than her other books did. The problem with the other travel books is that they were far too self-obsessed, and if you're going to focus on your own thoughts, you'd better have a sharply defined and unusual point of view (like Bell), or else you wind up with something self-indulgent. When I started reading her newest memoir, Something New, I knew it was about being reunited with her ex-boyfriend and their wedding. I dreaded another self-indulgent exercise. While there was some of that, I was pleasantly surprised at how homing in on an experience that was so specific, introspective and personal was so widely relatable and emotionally powerful.

I think there are a few reasons why this was so. First, doing this with another person meant changing her perspective from going it solo to being part of a team. Second, she was brutally honest with what went wrong with her boyfriend (she wanted kids and he didn't) and how things slowly changed over time. Not that Knisley hasn't expressed her feelings in past books, but in Something New, she goes much, much deeper and becomes a sympathetic character in her writings for the first time. Third, the honest push-and-pull regarding weddings and the institution of marriage itself made for some interesting frisson in the story, as she had to explore a lot of conflicting feelings. Finally, her always unfailing eye for detail broke up the very long and winding narrative with all sorts of hilarious interstitial material regarding the institution of marriage.

Emotional tone is something that's often been off in Knisley's comics. She talks about her emotions and having strong feelings, but there's an odd, almost clinical reserve in how she goes about depicting this on the page. Part of that, I think, is that her line is so unfailingly smoothed out (bordering on relentlessly cute) and her color scheme so pleasant (lots of pastels) that those feelings are visually muted. To her credit, when she talked about her feelings for her future husband John and the difficulties they endured, Knisley's use of body language (especially in how she and John related to each other in space) is what sold it to me as a reader. Something that Knisley reveals along the way is that the experience of planning the ceremony, with a lot of conflicting feelings and political ideals at play, was so overwhelmingly emotional that she felt herself distancing herself from her feelings in the moment. It wasn't until the moment itself came that the catharsis of emotion was able to emerge, and she was insightful in how she related this experience to the reader.

The book's main flaw is that it's bloated at almost 300 pages. I recognize that in part, she tried to relay her own particular experience with the mechanics of getting married in a systematic matter, but there were too many self-indulgent sequences that slowed the book down to a crawl. There was a conflict between simply relating an emotional narrative and the need she felt to focus on wedding details, customs and history, almost as a form of reportage. The entire DIY chapter could have been jettisoned with no impact on the narrative (emotional or otherwise), especially as eight pages of it felt like reading someone's Pinterest board. There's also a weird dichotomy regarding discussing money in the book. The book's title suggests that she's a "makeshift bride", and there were a lot of remarkable DIY elements at work in her wedding experience. For example, the ceremony was held in a barn on her mother's property that the two of them helped build themselves. For some of the less expensive things (especially things she made), Knisley is quite upfront about how much they cost, but she's more vague regarding other things she had to buy, like her dress, the food, the wedding planner, etc. It would have been interesting to compare what she had to spend with the average price of weddings (which she discusses in detail), if only to play up the possibilities that are available if one is creative and has a community of people that are willing to help. Again, it's understandable for someone not to discuss the financials in a public forum, but the fact that she discussed some but not all of the details was a lost opportunity.

There are some interesting emotional tensions at play in the book, especially between Knisley and her mother. She discusses screaming arguments and stress, as her mom tried to wrest control of the wedding away from her at times, but Knisley also discusses the gratitude she feels for her mother hosting the event and going above and beyond to help make it work. That said, Knisley frequently portrays her mom as being petulant, petty and obsessed with control, and I would have been curious to see how her mother perceived the same events--especially when Knisley leaves for 36 hours to have her bachelorette party. Related to that is Knisley's barely-disguised contempt for the wedding planner that was foisted on her by her mom. While the ever even-handed and self-analytical Knisley tries her best to describe the ways in which she was helpful, the actual depiction of her is of a slightly bumbling, scatterbrained person who was overly familiar and didn't have great boundaries. The nature of the conflict between Knisley and her mom as depicted in the book was actually a fundamental question of the book: who is the wedding for, exactly? Is it for the bride and groom, is it for the family, or is it for the community? What is the relationship between money and control in this equation? That is, if someone is paying for something with regard to the ceremony, do they have the right to supersede the wishes of the bride and groom?

In the end, this is a book about accepting that some conflicts don't have easy resolutions, and we simply must learn to live with them and compromise as we make choices, understanding that each choice brings its own set of pluses and minuses. Marriage represents losing freedom and absolute, individual choice, but it brings the possibility of building something with someone. (Indeed, the book's title refers overtly to the old wedding rhyme, but Knisley repurposes it at the end as she and John have started to build something new.) Marriage still feels like a rite of passage into adulthood, a concept that was difficult to swallow. Marriage contains all sorts of patriarchal and religious baggage as a couple suddenly joins a club they didn't quite understand they had signed up for. There is only one conflict that utterly and inescapably goes Knisley's way in the book, and that's the decision to have children. While John relented and said he was willing to do it, he's depicted later in the book saying that he was more excited about having a wedding and didn't really want to have children. It's telling that the book's final scene shows Knisley having her birth control implant removed, as the "something new" is clearly not just building a new life with John, but also refers to the possibility of creating a new life with him in the form of a child. Knisley indeed did give birth a few months ago and is also documenting that experience. Knisley's decision to document these events in real time instead of allowing for the possibility of perspective gained after time elapsing is a bold one. It provides a sense of immediacy that sometimes is absent from memoirs drawn for the distant past and also allows for a sense of open-endedness and some questions and concepts simply left unsaid, unresolved and a matter for contemplation by the reader.

Overboard: Lucy Knisley's Displacement

Lucy Knisley has cranked out four travelogue/food/memoir comics in addition to doing a number of other similar comics on her website. Her storytelling abilities, clarity and tasteful color sense are all undeniable. What is unfortunate, and in clear evidence in her most recent memoir comic Displacement, is that she continues to repeat herself from book to book and is bogged down by navel-gazing that borders on narcissism. That navel-gazing is aggravated by the clear lack of subtlety and restraint that literally sees her spell out her books' themes on the page itself. Indeed, Knisley looks back wistfully on a trip to Europe, saying "That trip was about INDEPENDENCE, SEX, YOUTH and ADVENTURE. This trip is about PATIENCE, CARE, MORTALITY, RESPECT, SYMPATHY and LOVE."

In this book, Knisley decides to accompany her elderly (both 90+ years old) grandparents on a Caribbean cruise they signed up for in their nursing home. While Knisley's affection for her grandparents is made clear, she also goes out of her way to wear martyr's stripes throughout much of the book--especially when comparing herself to the rest of the family, who worry about her grandparents but don't do much to help. Early in the book, she even wonders out loud what kind of narrative she'll end up with, ranging from "bonding time with my grands" to "a frustration fest". The most interesting part of the book is Knisley reprinting excerpts from a war autobiography that her grandfather wrote for his children as well as her. It's one of the few times in the book that any real insight into the character of her grandparents is revealed. Like most of her other comics, they are not so much about the subject at hand as they are about her feelings about the subject at hand. At a fundamental level, Knisley seems incapable of making any observations about the world surrounding her without going into great detail about her surface feelings about the matter. She teases at exploring her emotions in depth but generally tends to revert to her normally breezy style when things start to get heavy.

In other words, Displacement doesn't work as a travel/food memoir (which is how she bills herself, despite the fact that her descriptions of places rarely goes beyond surface details), nor does it work as a more personal work. Her greatest strength as a cartoonist--her ability to create a fluid, casual narrative--often is her greatest weakness, because her attempts at emotional honesty frequently come off as spoiled, bratty whining. She sneers at the other tourists on the ship (especially ones that are overweight). She complains about being on the ship and not being able to have any fun. When she's able to get out of her own head and actually report about the cruise itself, the book has moments both poignant and amusing. The absurdity of the on-ship entertainment is portrayed in funny detail, and the decline of her grandparents is at times heartbreaking. There are some delightful moments, when she encourages her grandparents to go swimming and discovers that her grandmother really takes to it. When her grandfather tells her at the end that he'd do it all again if she could come with them, it's a wonderful moment of warmth. There weren't quite enough of these moments, and I had the nagging sense that this book really should have been a 20 page short story rather than a 160-page book that had a lot of filler. Unfortunately for the reader, that filler mostly took the form of that whining about being on a luxury liner and navel-gazing. Contrasted to the sharper Relish, which had a strong editorial hand at First Second, and one can see that the greater freedom Knisley received in working with Fantagraphics wasn't necessarily a good thing.

Humblebrag: An Age of License

Of Lucy Knisley's first travelogue/memoir, French Milk, I wrote: "This is the sort of book that by definition an artist can only do once: an autobiographical rite-of-passage travelogue." Knisley's next book, Relish,  was an account of her life and her relationships with family through travel and food. Not quite a coming-of-age story, but she once again skirted the surface of important and potentially painful memories by breezily turning them into amusing anecdotes. With her third book (and first for Fantagraphics), Knisley is officially repeating herself with An Age Of License, a travelogue that's far less focused than her first two books and more teeth-grindingly irritating.

First, let me discuss Knisley's many virtues as a cartoonist. She has markedly improved since French Milk, a book that was hobbled by the occasional and unfortunate juxtaposition of drawings and photos. Relish saw her move into her mature style, though her line was occasionally overtaken by the First Second house coloring approach. The mix of color and crisp black & white in An Age of License makes this the first book of hers that truly showcases her abilities as a draftsman and a cartoonist. The control over her line that was crucial to developing her mature style is obvious, allowing her to become bolder and more experimental with the likes of page layouts, lettering and whimsical design decisions. Her understanding of gesture and body language using this cartoony style is spot-on; indeed, it's easy to understand what's going on in the book simply by flipping through it and without reading the words. Knisley arrived at this expertise by working like crazy; few cartoonists her age (27) have cranked out as many pages as she has. Her peers include the likes of Raina Telgemeier, Vera Brosgol, Erika Moen and Meredith Gran, all of whom use variations on this stripped-down, cartoony and easy to parse style. In terms of pure skill, she may have surpassed all of them.

Knisley's blessing and curse is her breezy, lightweight style. There's a relentless aimlessness that afflicts her comics, especially her attempts at long-form travelogues. At least in her first two books, she had a through-line that anchored that aimlessness. French Milk was about her relationship with her mother and her attempts at feeling like a grown-up, while Relish tried to connect all of her best memories with food. An Age Of License is about her feeling of aimlessness in her late twenties and trying to give it an excuse or at least a name, with the book's title (something she heard about in France) being the result. It is an exceedingly flimsy device to wrap a book around and in fact leads directly to one of the biggest problems I had with this book.

The comedian Harris Wittels is responsible for the term "humblebrag", which means to boast about something in the guise of either it somehow being a problem or a source of overpowering wonder. For an example, check out this Comics Journal diary strip  by Knisley. To fellow cartoonists, or pretty much anyone, it's difficult to see her stress over having a film crew in her home as anything but disingenuous humility. On one of the first pages of her book, she relates having a conversation with her agent about whether she should go be a guest at a convention in Norway. On the next page, she finagles her way into staying with her mother in France. Two pages later, she relates her nervousness and jitters regarding this amazing bit of luck. While this is only human nature (and I always get the sense that her humblebrags are unintentional), it's tough for a reader to have much sympathy for Knisley when she's worried about some details regarding the trip and moans about how much she'll miss New York, and how she finds herself torn between stability and "romance, adventure, excitement". The fact that she can support herself as a cartoonist (unlike many, many of her peers), that she has opportunities for international travel, that she has an agent who helps her find some of her opportunities are unconvincing as dramatic devices or as "obstacles" to overcome. For a moment, Knisley humanizes herself when she talks about still being torn up about a romantic relationship, though she immediately tells the reader that she met a new boy she was going to see on the trip.

The book ranged between a standard cartoonist's post-convention travelogue that one can see on any number of tumblr pages to those humblebrag attempts at injecting some kind of conflict or drama into the proceedings. Ironically, Knisley's guilt about her privilege and luck comes built in with the worry that she may never achieve wisdom. That is, she worries that her breezy books about "food and art & travel" don't amount to much, but then she reassures herself that "there is meaning in it, if to no-one else but me". Then she worries herself again by wondering "Perhaps the definition of unwise?" Those feelings of guilt pretty much evaporate after that, though she does assure the reader "I'm grateful, I'm grateful!" Clearly, Knisley isn't a multimillionaire or in a position where she has privilege on a scale that's grossly disproportionate to her artistic peers. She just has a knack for making those privileges occasionally seem like a burden, or rather for blowing the inconveniences that come with those privileges way out of proportion. I think part of the problem comes from her need to intimately merge her travel experiences with her personal emotions. For some writers, this can reveal hidden depths and get at raw emotions. For Knisley, this has not been the case, and this is unfortunate because her eye for detail is excellent. Simply turning the focus away from her and more toward her environment would at least be a change in her travelogues, a change that would be beneficial because it's clear that she's repeating herself.

Food and Drink: Knisley, Antal, Brideau/Toosi

Let's look at three comics that investigate the visceral and cultural joys of food and drink.

A Comic Guide To Brewing, by Lara Antal. All three of these comics have extensive how-to and history sections, which is not surprising when talking about food. What's a bit different about this comic is that it's told from the point of view of a character from Antal's series, Tales of the Night Watchman. The character, a barrista, speaks with such expertise about the subject that it's clear that Antal herself has spent time brewing coffee for a living. Antal's in-depth discussion on the kinds of coffee and the complexities of making it in its many forms is actually quite fascinating, especially in the way she cleverly designs each page to give it a lively, active feel. Her chops as a draftsman are not quite up to snuff in providing the kind of detail necessary to really highlight the different brewing systems and other technical stuff, though she more-or-less gets her point across. Of course, this was done as a 24-hour comic, so it's understandable that it's a bit rushed. Antal includes fun little gimmicks with this comic, like a cardboard spoon attached to the front cover.

Yock Yok, by Neil Brideau and Fereshteh Toosi. This is an odd little project from an organization called Regional Relationships, which "commissions artists, scholars, writers and activists to create works that investigate the natural, industrial and cultural landscapes of a region." In this case, writer Toosi investigates a curious food local to New Orleans and Virginia called Yock, which is classic poor people food that has a fervent following. It's essentially noodles and a ketchup-based broth that has as many permutations as it does different names and spellings. Brideau is not a top-notch draftsman, but like Antal, his clever design work makes each page a pleasure. The book is lighthearted in tone, freely dipping into tall tales surrounding yock while acknowledging its status as a beloved, crucial and above all else, regional food. It's hangover food that's cheap to make and generally contains whatever happens to be laying around the kitchen. It's not unlike pho or any other peasant food that relies on ingenuity and years of subtle alterations to attain its status as a comfort food icon. The fact that it is still very much a regional phenomenon in an age when industrial and commercial food is so dominant is both interesting and reassuring. The comic comes in a fancy bronze-colored envelope and comes with a CD containing an interview between Toosi and a woman named Joy Smith, who knows quite a lot about the subject.

Relish: My Life In The Kitchen, by Lucy Knisley. Knisley's new book will be published by First Second in April of 2013. This can best be described as a "food memoir", as Knisley mediates a number of key events in her life through the making and consumption of food. Born to foodie parents in a time when that term and way of life was just coming into being, Knisley was nourished by her parents in more ways than one. There's a sense in which this book is lightweight and a fluff piece; negative emotions and aspects of Knisley's life are mentioned only in passing or avoided altogether. At the same time, Knisley clearly hasn't had too traumatic of a life; she has two loving parents, lots of friends and tons of rich experiences as well as a career as an artist. Of course, not every autobio story has to be about the Holocaust, terminal illness, or dead parents in order to be engaging. Vanessa Davis' comics are a good example of this, and while I don't think Knisley is quite in her class as an artist, there's a cheerful, familiar and friendly tone to her work that immediately draws the reader in and makes them comfortable. Indeed, as Knisley's clear line and bright colors flow along and relay funny anecdotes and family recipes, I immediately wanted more. It's not what I would call comics junk food, but rather a simple but expertly rendered piece of pastry.

Knisley is simply a cheerful sort with a sharp eye and a highly-developed sense of wonder. She ends each of the brief chapters with a recipe that's brightly-rendered and amusingly annotated. Knisley is also far from a food snob. Her parents denied her processed food as a youngster, so she naturally gravitated towards it
and often ate it in secret. The chapter on junk food is funny and spot-on: people eat junk food because it tastes good, and eating it on rare occasions is not such a bad thing. She highlights this by discussing a trip to Rome with her father as a bratty teen (she gently chides herself for her behavior more than once in the book), where she got revenge on her dad one morning by going to the McDonald's across from the hotel and then chowing down on burgers and fries in front of him. A child of divorce, Knisley was nonetheless loved by both parents, even if her relationship with her father was fractious at times.

Knisley's eye for and memory of detail is a key reason why this book is a success. For example, in detailing a trip to a Mexican village as a pre-teen, she makes the page come alive when depicting how she and her best friend had total free reign to spend money there, thanks to their sick parents. The anecdote about her friend discovering Mexican pornography was as funny as her description of the cheap, astonishing delights of taqueria food was evocative. Indeed, considering that one can't smell or taste what she experiences throughout the book, she does a remarkable job of bringing to life everything around the experience itself. For example, her description of the circumstances of consuming a number of apricot-filled croissants on a humid Italian morning made my mouth water not so much for the food, but rather for the sheer aesthetic joy that Knisley experienced that morning. Above all else, that connection to simple beauty and her ability to convey it is what draws me to Knisley's work. It's not just a croissant, it's a means of expression and connection, which is how Knisley views food. Relish is a simple book about simple pleasures, providing account after account after why such enjoyment is so important.

Idealist Abroad: French Milk

Rob reviews the travelogue comics of Lucy Knisley, FRENCH MILK (Touchstone).

FRENCH MILK is a travelogue about transitions and the way a dramatic change of ritual can make us understand our choices a bit more clearly. Lucy Knisley was a 22-year-old in this story on the precipice of starting her adult life and faced a fair bit of anxiety about the prospect. She went to Paris for a month with her mother, ostensibly to celebrate the latter's 50th birthday and spend extensive time with each other while they still could. Knisley also had to deal with being separated from her lover for a protracted period and the home she had made in Chicago. It's funny to see a travelogue as the first major project of a promising young artist like Knisley. This is the sort of comic one generally sees from older, more experienced cartoonists who have already established their narrative voices.

At its heart, the book was about the tensions between the joys and restrictions of childhood versus the freedom and responsibility of adulthood. The one bad move Knisley made was spelling out this conflict in her afterword, which hammered home rather clumsily all of the themes she had elegantly teased out in the rest of the book. This had the feel of a young cartoonist who wasn't quite confident enough to let her work speak for itself. This is unfortunate, because Knisley's narrative voice shifted from childlike glee over things like food and dresses to an almost world-weary cynicism, illustrating the nature of this tension. When Knisley early in the book alerts the reader that she always feels herself revert to childhood habits whenever she returns home, it feels like she then goes out of her way to talk about her sex life as "proof" of her adulthood. It's unstated (until the end) but clear that the trip was mostly about finding new ways to relate to her mother now that both of their lives were changing in ways both subtle and dramatic.



That sense of melancholy and uncertainty certainly doesn't pervade the book. Indeed, Knisley focuses on things like food, sightseeing and other everyday trivia as a means of getting her mind in the right space. The book also feels like a way of reifying a powerful event: getting it down in ink, photos and thoughts was a way of solidifying the ephemeral nature of experience, and more pointedly, memory. What makes the comic a delightful and breezy read is how much of an open book Knisley presents herself as, remaining upbeat and reveling in delight even as she faces down her anxieties. She opens with a little bit of context about her family and life, but not so much as to drown the reader in details. Knisley begins with the events of just a few days before her trip to France, given us some grounding in the life she's leaving behind for awhile, her sense of curiosity, her neuroses and what she wants out of life.

Keeping a diary of an event often changes the way we perceive the experience. Knisley was clearly going after a series of magic moments and found them in the simplest encounters with food, art and a very old & established culture. Her brushwork has an appealing weight to it and I liked the way she composed each page. Some pages were comics with panel-to-panel transitions while others were labeled illustrations of what she was eating, visiting or wearing. The cartoony nature of her line gave the whole book a certain whimsical quality, even when Knisley temporarily descended into melancholy over her future career as an artist and the concept of financial responsibility. The drawings remind me a bit of Hope Larson (a friend and peer) but also a bit of a Dupuy-Berberian cityscape.

Knisley's youthful enthusiasm pervaded the entire project, especially in moments when she visited the graves of writers she found inspiring (like Oscar Wilde) or connected the experiences of writers she admired to Paris (like Ernest Hemingway). Once again, Knisley did take quite noticably inform the reader that she was not an innocent, injecting frank talk about her sex life into the otherwise breezy travelogue entries. She confessed that her obsessiveness on the topic had much to do with being apart from her boyfriend while having so many tempting opportunities in front of her. While Knisley expressed her fears and worries, she managed to avoid whining and at least continue to draw something interesting, even if it had nothing to do with Paris.

What makes the book a success is that her autobiographical voice is such a pleasantly winning one. She's so plain-spoken and unpretentious that the reader can't help but wonder what witty observation she'll make next. Combine that voice with her cartooning chops, and it's no wonder why this book was green-lighted by a major publisher. The multi-media aspect of the book had to have been another draw, with the mix of photographs, text and cartoons. It's a choice that made sense for a book aimed at audiences who read books about travel, giving them a bit of a foundation they understand and something to connect to the cartoons in the book. This is the sort of book that by definition an artist can only do once: an autobiographical rite-of-passage travelogue. That said, it would be interesting to see her repeat the experience in another twenty or thirty years, this time from the perspective of her mother. Until that time, I'll be curious to see how she evolves as an artist. Subtlety is not her strong point at the moment, so it'll be interesting to see if she can turn that weakness into a strength.