Minis: S.Lautman, T.Van Deusen

Black & White Diary Comics December-February 2017, by Sara Lautman. Lautman helpfully explains the entire premise of the mini in the title, and Birdcage Bottom Books published this collection. Lautman's comics have always been funny and strange, as she has always resolutely told her stories from a point of view that she never tries to explain or justify. Visually, her comics have always had a rock-solid and conventional formal sense of design, allowing her to get as wildly expressive as she wants with regard to figure drawing. Lautman is also consistently funny; sometimes it's dry humor and other times there's an over-the-top sense of "How can this be happening?" A good example is the first strip, "Crisis Hotline". Lautman, with an cartoonishly exaggerated nose and scribbly hair, calls up a crisis talk line. Lautman spills her problem to the person at the other end of the line (which was redacted) gets silence for a moment, and then a request for FaceTime (!). In one of those unbelievable moments, the call monitor is wearing a dog puppet on her arm and speaks in a dog voice ("That must be rrrruff!") until she breaks off in a fit of coughing. Tack on an awkward denouement, and you have a perfectly structured gag.

Lautman often builds her stories around a vague sense of discomfort. Whether it's singing alone at a karaoke night and trying to connect to some bros standing up, or a feeling of extreme anxiety as she steps in as a band's new drummer, Lautman always manages to feel out of place. There's a hilarious scene where she confesses to her friends what a horrible job she did and how sorry she was, and all she got was wonderful feedback. "Stupid supportive friends" she thinks, as she slinks away, as no one will feed her sense of inadequacy. That said, Lautman doesn't wallow, at least not without trying to generate laughs. There are also absurd, silly anecdotes, like attending "Gum Brunch" (which is exactly what it sounds like) and discussing the history and reverberations Gum Brunch has stirred up. There's another story where an older man approaches her in a bar, compliments her on the band t-shirt she's wearing, then walks away when she says the shirt was a gift and she wasn't really a fan. That all seemed standard until a woman runs up to them and says that that man was her uncle, and that this was the first thing he had said in thirty years! Lautman writes herself as a weirdness magnet even as she's finding it hard to deal with normal life, but she deals with both with a sort of deadpan humor that's accentuated by that appealingly scratchy, scribbly style.

I Wish I Was Joking, by Tom Van Deusen. This is a collection of odds and ends from Van Deusen from various anthologies; and as such, it has a slightly scattered feel. Van Deusen's favorite new character seems to be amazon.com head Jeff Bezos, and he is portrayed as barely able to interact with other people. There's a running joke about a disturbing relationship with his AI device Alexa (culminating in a great gag on the back cover) as well as him wrecking Seattle in his "Bezos-Bot"; essentially, it's Mecha-Bezos. It's sort of like a toddler having godlike influence on his world. A lot of the humor in the anthology is centered less on Van Deusen (usually the star and main target of his stories) and more on various celebrities. There's an uncomfortable, extended sequence where Van Deusen visits the home of Dave Matthews, who as it turns out (in this story, at least) is a coprophile and discusses this at length. Then there's a visit to an old Real World house, which has fallen into total savagery since the cameras left. It's a bit of low-hanging fruit for Van Deusen.

More amusing are "Undercover Grandpa" (exactly what it sounds like), which gets especially weird when the grandpa dies and leaves his grandson his head in a jar, which is then programmed to say all kinds of disturbing things. Then there's a strip where Van Deusen goes to the doctor, who winds up being a lab-coat wearing, stethoscope-wielding duck. It's not an anthropomorphic duck either--just a duck. It's total lunacy, as the duck goes wild and tries to attack Van Deusen. Overall, Van Deusen's best strips are the "autobio" strips where he portrays himself as an awful person, because they are both funnier and cut deeper, even when they stray into total fiction.

Minis: S.Lautman, K.Fricas, C.Bean

Blabbermouth 2 and Art Fan, by Katie Fricas. This issue of Blabbermouth has a clever premise: taking a bunch of notes friends wrote to her in 7th grade and creating a narrative of sorts out of them, accompanied by Fricas' distorted and often grotesque figure drawings with garish, non-naturalistic colors. The results, as you might guess, are hilarious. Fricas prints notes that pinball from sheer teenage boredom and discussion of tedious school-related minutia related to tests to wacked-out stories of home, like one kid getting in a screaming match with her mother and then locking herself in the bathroom, calling her a bitch. An anecdote about scoliosis testing gets across the intense feeling of humiliation that went into the exams, especially if one's spine was curved. There's lots of talk about guys and one note where someone was trying to comfort Fricas by saying "You are not as ugly as you think you are" after a guy turned her down. Fricas is never less than intense in depicting all of the awful and yet sweet absurdity of being a 7th grader, in the form of documents that clearly meant enough to her to keep for well over a decade.

Art Fan is a collection of art criticism that Fricas did in the form of comics on the art website Hyperallergic. I could read a full-length book of these pieces, as her ratty line, effective use of grey, expressive use of color and uncanny ability to evoke the spirit of each of the art shows she attended gave me a thorough understanding of what each show as about. The Duke Riley show "Fly By Night", which involved going to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, waiting for sundown, and watching pigeons wearing LED lights being compelled to fly up and to the nearby bridge. That kind of extreme stunt in the service of a simple aesthetic reminds me a bit of the sort of thing Christo does, only it involved "defying their nature, the pigeons refused to surrender to a darkening sky". Pedro Reyes' "Doomocracy" combined the aesthetic of an interactive art installation with that of a haunted house in a critique of capitalism and political corruption that felt harrowing in interesting ways. Fricas seemed drawn to shows that pushed typical understanding and experience of art but wasn't necessarily out-and-out performance art. A strong visual component seemed key to her appreciation of the show, which is one reason Bjarne Melgaard's show bored her, as it was dull to look at and felt more like a fashion shows advertisement disguised as a show than authentic self-expression. Whereas the fashion history show Rei Kawakubo show's presentation had a whimsy and specifically a punk attitude that took the familiar and stretched it, battered it, and bloodied it and still came out looking beautiful. I'd love to see Fricas turn her discerning eye to reviewing comics, as she's an outstanding writer and gets to the heart of works in a clear manner.

Ghost Sex, by Sara Lautman. Lautman's comics are some of the strangest I've ever seen in terms of being in service to their own internal logic and nothing else. They are anti-narratives, like one story about a person anticipating a smell, inhaling the aroma, and then waiting for it to come back around again. The lines are thick, quick and simple. "The Most Popular Thing" is simply someone musing what the most popular thing happens to be, whether it's ice cream, dogs, music or "likes". There's a joke about a hamburger that's the same image on page after page, with only the accompanying text telling us something absurd about the item of food. The titular comic is the most interesting, as Lautman really plays with form here, as two Pac-Man style ghosts go from first base and then all the way home. Lautman is playful with her use of shapes and the way they relate to sex--especially when the two ghosts merge. Lautman's attention to seemingly inconsequential details is a strategy for her overall project of observing the absurd in everyday life.

Snake Pit and Why Draw?, by Cara Bean. Bean is an art teacher and many of her comics are about the experience of teaching and the process of teaching. Why Draw? is more in the vein of the sort of thing that Lynda Barry does, except it takes what Barry regards as a self-evident truth (everyone loves to draw) and delves into it a bit. On page one, she explodes Barry's "Two Questions" ("Is this good?" Does this suck?") that inhibit both creativity and the basic pleasure that making marks on paper brings. She does this by using her self-caricature (an anthropomorphic bean, of course) to say, "You don't have to like your drawings. I will like them." There's power in that statement, as Bean gives the potential student (the reader) and gives them unconditional support in what they draw. They just have to do it. From there, Bean goes into the litany of positive effects that drawing can have on the brain. From there, she does short strips about various artists and their comments about drawing, as well as getting into the right mental space to draw. This feels like a perfect mini to hand out on the first day of a drawing or comics class.

Snake Pit sees Bean use her talent for synthesizing lectures into short comic strips that crystalize certain topics. Here, it's adolescent depression and suicide. The way she illustrated the symptoms of depression, for example, gives them a solidity that simply reading a list of symptoms does not. Without minimizing them, she uses funny drawings to make them even more memorable, like a group of arrows branching off to indicate problems with concentration. Similarly, for more serious symptoms (like suicidal ideations), her drawing a mountain that someone's scaling, wishing they didn't exist, is a powerful visual metaphor. Bean goes on to describe some of the consequences of depression (like learned helplessness) as well as treatments like Cognitive Behaviorial Therapy (CBT). It's a clear, non-judgmental and easy to understand distillation of a lot of information, as the simplicity and fluidity of Bean's clean line carries a lot of complex information.

Minis: E.Davis, L.Nichols, K.Froh, A.Shrestha, S.Lautman

Libby's Dad, by Eleanor Davis. This Retrofit release is further proof of Davis' versatility. Her issue of Frontier ("BDSM") showed off her black & white chops, while this comic looks like it was done entirely in colored pencils. Davis' comics are usually pointed in terms of her themes and the emotions she wants to explore, but she deflects away from hammering that point home through a series of interesting strategies. This comic is about the complexities surrounding emotional spousal abuse and how its fallout affects children. Davis' strategy was to tell this story entirely through the daughter of that estranged couple (Libby) and her friends during the course of a sleepover. The essential conflict of the story is that one of the members of the group was forbidden to come over to over by her mother because Libby's father had threatened to shoot Libby's mom. The rest of the story (told from the perspective of Libby's friend Alex) is essentially a debate as to whether or not that could possibly be true.

The genius of the book is Davis' unfailingly accurate depiction of children and the way they interact, with all the innocence and casual cruelty that implies. Davis' character design and her use of colored pencil gives the book the feel of a children's book, with exaggerated facial expressions, cheery colors and uncannily precise body language that gets across the energy that kids generate when they're in this kind of environment--especially since Libby's dad bought a house with a swimming pool and bought them all lunch. A running theme in Davis' comics is the way that adults try to keep secrets from children and fail to trust their ability to understand difficult situations. What the adults fail to understand is that children hear and understand far more than they might realize, only without context that knowledge can be warped. That's certainly the case here, as Libby's friends debate whether or not Libby's dad was nice or a monster and whether Libby's mom was a potential victim or a liar (there was no middle ground). The comic comes to a head when night falls and the colors turn from friendly greens, yellows and light blues to dark and oppressive midnight blue. There's another color whose presence is a constant in the book: blood red. It becomes especially prominent in the slumber party scene, especially when a spilled bottle of nail polish splatters the carpet like blood. Suddenly, jokes about Libby's dad and his gun turn into pure fear, as the white image of a gun against the dark blue background is a clear indicator of their mutual panic.

An exasperated Libby, who has been mostly silent up until this point, gets up and tells her weeping friends to shut up, and declares that her dad's not scary. There's a chilling two-page spread where her friends are in the bottom left corner of one page and Libby goes out the foreboding door in the upper-right hand corner of the next page, indicating a gulf between them as well as a sense of things not ever being the same when she returns from her dangerous quest. Their fears peak as the next two pages are devoid of backgrounds as they imagine her dead shooting all of them, shrouded in shadows. Davis comes back from that image with Libby's dad cheerfully cleaning up the mess in a room with the light on, bathed in a comforting yellow. That act is "proof" to Alex that "Libby's mom is crazy and a liar", and the girls are now free to have a carefree good time. Of course, what Davis is getting at is how women are made to feel crazy for responding to abuse, for people assuming they are lying or exaggerating and in general doubting the stories of survivors. There's also a larger question of complexity: Libby's dad may treat her well, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't abusive toward his mom, even if that threat was an empty one. The way the girls react can be explained in part because they are just children, but Davis' larger point is that it wasn't just them who reacted that way, as the parents of the other children had no problem with them spending time at Libby's dad's house. This is a story about abuse and the ways in which so many people prefer to believe that it doesn't happen, and Davis' use of color masterfully takes us through every element of the narrative, modulating emotion along the way.

Senior Time, by Kelly Froh. If one of Davis' special skills as a cartoonists is portraying children, then one of Froh's is portraying the elderly. This mini is about failing upwards, beginning with Froh fervently hoping she was going to get laid off because her desk job was debilitating her, both mentally and physically. Coming to terms with the idea as someone over forty that they weren't ever going to make a lot of money is difficult in a society driven by financial success as a measure of overall success. Froh struggles with that idea but counters it by embracing her role in the arts as well as time spent helping the elderly and teaching comics. Each page features a single image, some typeset text and Froh's own cursive script. The latter was especially important in establishing an intimate line of communication with the reader, but it also represented the kinds of relationships she was having with her clients.

Froh balances the tremendous respect she has for her elderly clients with her cartoony and slightly grotesque character design, and the gentle humor she records in this comic is modulated by her thoughtful and gentle voice as a narrator. Above all else, she listens, and she responds with respect but also humor. The variety of mental and emotional states among those living in retirement homes dictates some of Froh's work here, as one woman who kept asking "Then what?" whenever Froh would tell her what came next led to Froh expounding on what was really her own life goal: a full life, meaningful relationships, love and happiness. When the reply to that was "Then what?", what else could Froh say but, "Then, you die". I'm not sure if that last conversation happened verbatim, but that's not really important; what was important was the way Froh was encouraging and optimistic but also realistic and accepting of our ultimate fate. This comic is about process, and for Froh, it's processing the richness she feels in her current role, even as she is just barely able to piece things together.

Macrogroan #7, by Sara Lautman. Lautman has slightly refined her scratchy, sloppy scribbly line just enough to make her comics more easily intelligible but not so much as to lose their spontaneity and pure beauty. Simply as a personal aesthetic preference, I love artists who have mastered the ability to create characters using expressive scribbles because that spontaneity is key to making the characters come alive. They have a wobbly, vibratory quality to them that creates a sense of motion and energy on the page, even when the images themselves depict a silent character sitting on a stoop. Like Jules Feiffer, both Lautman's line and her handwritten lettering are beautifully sloppy in an inspiring way. It also helps that she has a sharp sense of humor, ranging from self-deprecation to crafting a shaggy dog story for the sake of a pun. The way she draws herself as frequently slumped over, with a pointy nose and messy hair, only adds to the sheer pleasure I get from looking at her drawings. When she uses grayscale, she often just uses her pencil to gray-out some backgrounds so as to give her drawings some more weight. There's also a great deal of charm in her strips, like one in which she enthuses about a "classic date spot" in New York (The Cloisters), which turns out to be from a banned lesbian young adult novel from the early 80s--which her friend calls her on. Lautman's autobio reminds me a bit of Sophie Yanow's, only less angular and less political. Lautman's comics explore comic and quotidian aspects of city life with occasional forays into surrealism. She's become a much better storyteller, especially in terms of panel-to-panel transitions. It's pretty clear that she could do something long form or collect strips thematically, much like Gabrielle Bell does. She's certainly hit on a winning formula.

Genus, by Anuj Shrestha. This batch of one to two page stories and illustrations is separate from the body horror/conspiracy series of the same name, but the aesthetic is very much the same. In this zine, that aesthetic of people slowly having their faces completely subsumed by a wriggling, plant-like growth is entirely ignored, especially in terms of the narratives that Shrestha spins. The first story is about a young girl's experiences in school as an avid participant--almost too avid. In this and other strips, the growths seem to be a visual metaphor for a kind of inner ugliness made external, except that everyone experienced it the same way. It's a stripping away of innocence and a reflection of the parasitic or codependent nature of our relationships. The more materially and financially accomplished a person became, as in the story "Company Dinner", the more disfigured and inhuman each person became, until their heads stopped being recognizable as human. The illustrations are all of fashionable, hip looking people whose faces have become entirely transformed into that mass of writhing tentacles/stalks. The final strip, "Genus Company Policy" reveals that the system is rigged from the start. Shrestha's line drawings are exquisite as always, as they add a level of chilly distance to the everyday activities they depict.

Flocks, Chapter Five, by L.Nichols. Nichols' incredibly empathetic and humane autobio series about the various groups that have had an impact on their life reaches an almost unbearable point of agony and then resolves in an unexpected but remarkably hopeful way. Growing up in rural Louisiana as a queer kid led to all sorts of feelings of self-hatred, even as the local church community often provided her tremendous support and encouragement. Nichols rejects all binary arguments and instead embraces the contradictions that surround us. It was possible for people in their church and their family to support them in some ways but make them inadvertently feel like a sinner in others. They were often a shield for them and encouraged their budding academic talents in the face of bullying from the other kids at school. Their parents were another set of contradictions, simultaneously encouraging Nichols and making them feel worthless. This volume follows up on hints laid down in earlier volumes, as Nichols' father asks for a divorce, leading Nichols' mom to leave the house with all the prescription drugs. Nichols details the ways in which their parents put them in the middle, each attacking the other.

Nichols depicts themself as a rag doll in their autobio comics buffeted by the inexorable forces of physics. This is an especially apt metaphor given the way Nichols felt pushed and pulled, reducing them to a pile of stuffing. Nichols details the ways in which their church helped them and their mother out, no questions asked: food, clothes, shelter, etc. Even with the weight of being queer bearing down on them as a young teen, Nichols' faith was still a comfort in the face of extreme anxiety. Nichols finally gets relief when they're accepted into the state Science, Math & The Arts high school. Here, Nichols meets a new flock. No longer an outsider due to their intellect and interests, Nichols finds unconditional support for the first time in their life. There's a remarkable scene when one of Nichols' friends basically tells them to come out, that everyone knew they were interested in girls--and it was OK. The pressure arrows bearing down on Nichols disappeared as the one thing they thought they'd never get and didn't deserve--true acceptance--was freely given. After extending empathy, compassion, understanding and the benefit of the doubt to everyone else, Nichols finally gave it to themself. The joy and radiance in Nichols' line at this point fairly bursts off the page as they were able to extend and receive the trust that had been broken with their parents.

Mini-Comics: Lautman, Whitaker, Boyce, Froh

Creation of Manson, The We Be Jammin' Tee and Grape-Nuts, by Sara Lautman (Ray Ray Books). Lautman's scribble comics can go from quotidian to grotesque on a moment's notice, often creating a jarring, unsettling reading experience. Grape-Nuts, for instance, follows three women cleaning out a garage, until a man comes out and makes mention of them eating cereal. As the trio mock him, he piles up lawn chairs and frames, sets them on fire, and walks right into them and then back out, horrifically burned. It felt like he was going to extreme lengths to prove a point or make an impact, and that final blocky, bulky figure is rendered with a great deal of detail that's unusual for Lautman. The We Be Jammin' Tee is a reflection of Lautman's absurd sense of humor, as a ratty t-shirt is rescued and given life by the T-Shirt Magic Fairy, becoming a headless and limbless torso. It's simultaneously sweet and deeply weird. Creation of Manson is along the lines of the prior comic, as it imagines Marilyn Manson's origin story in all its viscerally obscene and hilarious detail. The way Lautman varied her approach with regard to line thickness and overall rendering contributed to the story's mythological qualities. Lautman's sensibilities and approach are unlike virtually any cartoonist working today, with the possible exception of Josh Bayer--and even then, their styles seem like distant cousins.

The Weeknight Casserole Collection, by Kelly Froh. This is a collection of work done for a wide variety of anthologies, and Froh points out in an introduction that while anthologies are often uneven, they've provided her with structure and deadlines that have helped keep her productive. Froh's comics have always had a mix of the sweet and the slightly grotesque, both in terms of her drawing style and the subjects she covers. Her comics about her childhood often feature her in unflattering eyeglasses and hairstyles, and she plays those up for laughs, to be sure. At the same time, her stories about people often acting cruel have a remarkable amount of sympathy for all parties involved; the people in her stories are all human, and she has an acute understanding that everyone is capable of kindness and cruelty. "The Wrong Eric" is a good example of this, as it features Froh's disappointment that a boy she liked wasn't interested in her, but she showed a similar disinterest in a different boy further down the social food chain--which perhaps indirectly led to future bad behavior on his part. Froh is also great at drawing humor out of social awkwardness, like when she didn't realize a friend of hers was in a band that she was waiting to see, or the incredibly strange situation of her boyfriend's best friend possibly hitting on him in front of her. Froh also has a knack for writing open-ended stories that have disturbing components, like "The Rake", which is about the night terrors she has had since she was a child that involve feeling like someone is looking at her as she's asleep, someone dark and shadowy. The warm and inviting nature of Froh's narrative style and line results in a reading experience where one can see multiple sides of a story and where even unsettling experiences are depicted in a manner that's somehow less threatening--as though they were all ingredients in the same dish.

Bangs and Beard Diary, by Melinda Tracy Boyce and Aaron Whitaker. This is a sweet, clever idea: a flip-book comics diary, with a couple each doing their own separate diary of the same days. Boyce, the "Bangs" part of the couple, uses an open page format with no lines around her panels. While there is a clear differentiation between panels thanks to shading, it's her use of negative space that's key to making these comics works. When depicting time passing and panel-to-panel transitions that reflect that, she uses a lot of negative space. When each image is more discrete, there's a harder delineation between panels, with decorative markings or simple grey-scaling doing the job. Her drawing and writing style remains similar to that of Vanessa Davis, only Boyce employs a more cartoony style. Boyce shares the same overall cheeriness but is also willing to delve into troublesome emotions and situations, like her strips about body image. Whitaker's comics are denser and use a more traditional grid set-up. In part because some of the strips were done during shows where only Boyce was participating, Whitaker's strips are a bit more introspective, as he expounds on a variety of observations. The two cross over twice: once on a meaningful walk in Los Angeles and once in a tender moment spent alone at the end of a trip. The resulting collaboration of sorts paints a picture of two artists confident in their own skins who greatly benefit from the presence of the other.

Globes, by Aaron Whitaker. This comic is a sort of a second cousin to The Little Prince, as the story's protagonist starts the story atop a globe, in search of meaning and happiness in his life. The story diverges from Saint-Exupery in that the hero has his 3D printer create a son for him, one full of questions that the protagonist is not ready to answer. The story spins further as his son grows up, moves out (full of teenage energy and certainty) and then visits again with his own family. The tone of the comic ranges from absurd and cynical to sweet and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same page. Whitaker nonetheless manages to convey a real sense of what it's like to chase meaning and how one's mistakes as a parent carry over to a child begging for guidance. Whitaker heightens these conflicts, of course, and his cartoony character designs (not unlike Adventure Time creations) allow him to keep the stakes high while still keeping the overall mood of the comic light. What I liked best about this comic was Whitaker's willingness to strategically clutter every page with all sorts of detritus, charts, maps, etc. The way he pokes fun at his stand-in's quest for meaning and his overall pompousness doesn't detract from the emotional content of the comic, which is an impressive trick for Whitaker.

More Autobio: Park, Lautman, Fricas

Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream #4, by Laura Park. Park is unquestionably one of the most skilled cartoonists around. She's best known for illustrating other people's projects for a living, but her own autobio comics are at once funny, heart-breaking and sharply observed. Her self-caricature is one of the best in comics--especially when she's wearing a hat. Her strips about happiness, loneliness and illness are especially affecting, because Park gets at the essence of her feelings with a minimum of self-pity but a maximum of thought. There's a strip about going to a bra-fitting that's absolutely hilarious, while a strip about not having enough to say or being good enough to do her own comics is powerful. Despite her obvious talent, it's obvious that some of the comics she makes simply don't come out in the manner she imagines. I should note that this issue of the mini (published by Uncivilized Books) is sketchbook-raw, with several images and tiny strips crammed on some of the pages. Happily, Drawn & Quarterly will be publishing a collection of her work.

MacroGroan 6 and Lying And Cursing: 2 Stories, by Sara Lautman. Lautman's images are scrawled and scratched across the page. Her scribbly self-caricature is especially appealing, especially the way she draws her hair as an indistinct blob. MacroGroan is a sketchbook comic featuring mostly humorous observations by the artist. What I like best is the way she experiments with different visual styles. The scribble is always there, but sometimes it's on a page with detailed cross-hatching and background details, creating wobbly and almost vibratory effect. On other pages, the images are still and dominated by heavy use of blacks. Even in her simplest drawings, there's a detail or two that makes the images pop, like the way she draws eyes. Some pages are overlaid with other images, while still others strategically use grey-scaling. Her observations are funny, even when dealing with serious issues like therapy. Lautman's mind goes in a lot of different directions, and her comics reflect this.

Lying and Cursing is part autobio, part fiction. Each page in this 5.5 x 5.5 inch squarebound mini is a single image, which allows those scribbly drawings to breathe a little more. The first story is a history of Lautman's love of swearing, including resistance she's received from doing it as well as musings on the implications of cursing versus blessings (including saying "bless you") after sneezes. The story is a mix between genuine contemplativeness and total silliness. The second story focuses on an idea Lautman had about a story where a bunch of kids convince a naive and gullible friend that ridiculous things are true, like "Jellyfish are immortal", only to find that once she believed it, it automatically changed reality to accommodate this new belief. Describing it as "Amelia Bedelia meets Quantum Leap", Lautman takes the idea to some dark places. Lautman's greatest strength as a storyteller is her ability to make every idea, every story and every journal entry sound like a conversation she's having with you, the reader.

Blabbermouth 1, by Katie Fricas. It's not unusual for autobio cartoonists to write about sex, or even do a history of their sexuality. What's different about Fricas' work is that it's as much about rudimentary feelings of desire that one feels as a child as it is about actual sexual experiences. In a highly expressive scrawl that looks like it's ripped straight from her id, Fricas goes in chronological order to discuess being referred to as a pervert by someone's mother at the age of ten, seeing girls in summer clothes at the age of eleven, writing stories about sex and then ripping them to pieces at fifteen, etc. The page about losing her virginity is just a drawing of the stucco ceiling above her; the image itself is fascinating, highly detailed and beautiful in its own way--as opposed to the actual experience. There are drug-laden encounters, dizzying experiences and moments seared into her memory. There's also a sequence where her mother tells her that she had a child much earlier in her life and gave it up for adoption. Fricas spills a lot of ink in this comic, both literally and figuratively. Her splotched line gets at the emotional content of an experience, the part that's most closely associated with memory, as opposed to trying to accurately recreate the "real" experience.