Grief and Joy: Carol Tyler's You'll Never Know

My father died five years ago this month. He and I were not especially close; we got along fine after sorting out our difficulties a couple of decades ago, but we had little in common. I liked him well enough but didn't have any especially strong feelings for him. My mother died thirty years ago last month, when I had just become a teenager. There was no one else in the world I was closer to at the time. My reaction to the two events could not have been more different, though not in the way one might expect. As a teen, I was not able to fully process my mother's death. I simply retreated to my room for a week and read stacks of comic books. I never experienced a demonstrative emotional reaction until the day before my wedding, over twenty years later, when I saw an old black & white photograph of my fiance's grandmother on her wedding day, standing next to her mother. Something about that sense of familial continuity stirred an emotion in me I heretofore had never truly felt: grief. I sobbed uncontrollably, unable to contain the buried emotions for another moment. It took me a while to fully process that experience, given the intensity of the emotions that surround one's wedding day, but I knew that it felt cathartic.

When my father was dying, I traveled a great distance to see him in his hospital. There was a look in his face of wonder and almost gratitude when he saw me. None of my feelings had really changed regarding him, but I knew I was entering a new kind of emotional space, albeit one that was familiar and from an earlier life. I spoke at his funeral and was sincere in the way that I praised him, the way he lived his life toward the end and how he battled depression. After the funeral, I collapsed into my brother's arms, once again sobbing uncontrollably for a few minutes. After that release of grief and the subsequent, low-key wake, I had a number of personal epiphanies regarding why all societies and religions have grief rituals. It's not so much the substance of the ritual that's important, but rather the chance as a family and community to engage that grief, to be present and truly feel that grief, rather than let it fester. It was also at this moment that I realized I was ready to become a father.

When my daughter was born, I intellectually understood what I was about to receive: the gift of unconditional love. It's one thing to know it and quite another to actually experience it. It was powerful and ecstatic, and I've come to understand it as a remarkable tool for the survival of our species. Raising a child is such difficult and unrelenting work that this gift is sometimes what keeps a parent going. Of course, the flipside of this love is grief; losing someone that you give or gave this unconditional love to is devastating, even if that bond one feels as a child ebbs over time. Losing a child as a parent is the most unthinkable disaster of all; a gift cruelly and randomly snatched away. As a father, it is what I fear most.

The world of alternative comics is starting to see more personal narratives directed toward child-rearing and the emotional complexities thereof. As a reader, I feel especially drawn toward personal narratives that speak a kind of truth about the sheer terror of the parenting experience, especially the sense that one is somehow doing it wrong. Comics have the power to speak to this experience with a particular kind of power, given the way that they can be more or less naturalistic in style and modulate emotion with any number of visual & narrative tricks. The work of art that speaks to me the most in how it runs the gamut of emotions regarding being a parent is cartoonist and fine artist Carol Tyler's You'll Never Know series.

You'll Never Know (Fantagraphics Books) spans three volumes, 350+ pages and eight years. All of that work, a career-topping labor of genius, stems from a single question: "Why is my father incapable of showing me love?" That single question mushroomed such that Tyler found herself having to explain everything: her father's service during World War II, the stormy but steady relationship of her parents, her wn failed marriage and subsequent time spent as a poverty-stricken single mother, the mental illness of her daughter, the slow and uneasy reunion with her husband, and her own status as daughter, mother, sister, wife and artist. If this sounds a bit all over the map, that's because it is, but Tyler slowly pulls the strings of her narrative taut in some astonishing ways, especially in the third volume.

Tyler's theory regarding why so many men from the "Greatest Generation" were incapable of showing love was that the war was horrific but that the soldiers were discouraged from processing their trauma. Unprocessed trauma, like any strong negative emotion, never really goes away. Tyler set out on a quest to get her dad to talk about his experiences and document them in her loose comics form that mixes and matches collage, painting, drawing and craftwork. That quest was a way of distracting herself from the mess her own life was in after her husband left her and their young child for another woman, as well as a way of trying to examine her own emotional state. Her father finally did open up a bit to experiencing horrific events like witnessing "rivers of blood", things that transformed him from happy-go-lucky to grim. Tyler curses the specter of Hitler and war in general at the end of the first volume, "A Good and Decent Man", trying to reconcile her father's emotional deadness with her image of him as a good person.

The second volume, "Collateral Damage", examines the grief of wives and mothers. It discusses the many ways in which Tyler's mother had to put up with her father's rages and unpredictable moods. It also goes to the heart of her mother Hannah's grief in "The Hannah Story", which was about her mother finally coming to terms with the death of her young daughter Ann decades later. This story is all about repressed grief and the toll it takes, as she was never allowed or encouraged to mourn. Instead, she was pressured to think about her duty and moving on, an attitude that served no one, especially as the other children were forbidden to say her name. In one of the most powerful sequences in comics history, Tyler depicts her mother allowing herself to feel that loss as she went through a box filled with Ann's things, with Tyler noting that Ann's name will always be nestled inside her mother's.The third volume sees Tyler trying to find herself as a woman in a marriage whose boundaries were nebulous, tending to her daughter's obsessive-compulsive disorder that had gone unchecked (unbeknownst to Tyler) for far too long, and attempting to wrap up this project with her increasingly cantankerous father. There's a moment of closure when Tyler takes him to the WWII Memorial but not in the way she expected. When her father breaks down in tears in their car, it's not because of the memorial, but because he too was wrecked by the death of his daughter. Tyler skillfully depicts the way in which her father is stunned by his own connection to that long-ago grief and what it made him become. The war may have left a terrible mark but not one worse than the devastation he faced at home.

The overriding theme of the book is that "you'll never know" the feelings of one's parents, of other people in general. Tyler manages to bridge that gap in attempting to grapple with her own grief regarding her marriage and her daughter, knowing full well that the dread of potential loss lurks in the shadow of the everyday joy of having a child. The book represents a grueling but priceless experience of knowing that she may not be able to relate to her father's experience during war, but she certainly understands the feelings associated with not being able to protect or save one's own child. It's a remarkable example of an artist being totally honest about their own feelings of grief and joy in a manner that provokes growth and fully embraces the relationship between the two. It's also a scathing rebuke against the societal forces that pressure us to withhold grief and fear. Tyler experienced both on a regular basis as a mother, during and after her postpartum psychosis that she touches on in this book as well as her other major work Late Bloomer, and it's clear that only through allowing herself to have felt strong negative emotions toward her baby was she able to move beyond them and the guilt associated with those feelings. In the end, Tyler emphasizes the joy of her relationship with both her daughter and her parents, relishing giving and receiving a deeper and richer version of a child's unconditional love.

On Parenting: Weinstein, Ayuyang and Hart

As the parent of a toddler, I've taken an increasing interest in comics regarding parenthood, which in itself is a relatively new phenomenon in alt-comics. Carol Tyler and Joe Chiappetta were two of the first to do so, but there are quite a few more cartoonists close to my age who are exploring the full range of emotions regarding parenthood: joy, grief, terror, frustration, etc.

Lauren Weinstein's "If This Is All You Get" is a four-page minicomic drawn from the upcoming anthology, The Big Feminist But. It's a hilarious take on the ways in which she internalized her mother's own urge to be perfect and save the world, mixed with the push-and-pull of her youthful pledge to avoid motherhood in favor of being a "real" artist and the realities that a loving relationship offer later in life. Weinstein confronts head-on the anxiety that women who have children often express about having children: the possibility that they may never be able to create again, especially during the demanding early years of motherhood. This comic is both an attempt to grapple with these issues and the product of that very struggle with the creative process and the guilt felt for carving out time to create. Weinstein amusingly gets at that feeling as she hears her daughter say "I love you, babysitter" as she walks away to her studio. At the same time, I admire and identify with her total sincerity in the statement "The baby is the product of your undying faith and hope that your husband and you have in each other." It gets at the way that having a child is a gift.

Rina Ayuyang's comic Outta This Comes The Crazy is a sketchbook diary surrounding her pregnancy and the next few months after the birth of her son. Ayuyang, like Weinstein, is a witty and upbeat artist who chooses to draw in a style that's a series of quick, simple smudges and lines that retain the spontaneity and vitality of the moment. Ayuyang's comics mix excitement and anxiety as she details trying to finish her first book before she gives birth; that metaphor of twin births quickly gives way when the real birth happens. There's an amazing page where Ayuyang captures the push-and-pull of emotions with great precision: sadness that her husband will have to go back to work soon after the baby was born, despair over ever getting her life back, confusion over whether the feeling that "this kid is kicking my ass" is due to hormones or "because I'm not cut out for this?" There's a scene where she's in bed trying to catch up on some much-needed sleep but worries that her baby's been asleep for five hours. She fears the worst until she hears her baby pass gas--a fitting gag to defuse that horrid feeling. The book ends on a note of uncertainty, the final page a drawing of three blank-faced individuals, with Ayuyang saying "Now what?"

That sense of uncertainty and occasional terror is encapsulated perfectly in Tom Hart's fantasy tale Daddy Lightning (Retrofit Comics). It's about a father traveling with his baby in a forest with limited resources. Hart gets at the mania one feels when trying to soothe a crying baby while trying to answer one's own biological needs, that visceral sense of permanent emergency that accompanies having a baby. The setting of the story places the real basics of childcare into sharp relief, as he has a limited supply of milk, diapers and money as the titular character is trying to create a new life for himself and his baby. As the main character picks up new skills like swaddling (an absolutely crucial technique that was utterly mysterious to me as someone who had no prior experience with children), he's faced with obstacles like trying to think of inspiring fathers in literature and history (Chronos? Oedipus? Abraham?), hiccups, making money to buy food and milk, winning a contest, facing off against a warrior trying to get his shopping cart and desperately trying to get a waffle.

This rollicking, scatological story has the cadence of a folk tale, one that belied the grim reality of Hart's actual daughter dying at the age of two. He had written but not drawn the story before her death, and the comic became a sort of invocation for her return, a way to make her come to life on the page. The comic is beautiful and funny because that's how Hart thought of his daughter. The sense of presentness in this comic is remarkable. It's a story that's about nothing but the present moment, and Hart never deviates from being in the moment of the rush of exciting terror that is fatherhood. My wife was hospitalized a few days after our daughter came back from the hospital and I was forced to fly solo with a preemie for several days. I didn't allow myself to feel terror in that moment because I knew I couldn't afford to feel it, and I instead just focused on the next task: feed, change, burp, sleep, repeat. In reading Hart's comic, that sense of terror came flooding out for the first time as I felt so closely connected to Daddy Lightning, and doubly so for knowing just what's at stake. I'm in awe of Hart's willingness to grapple with that grief and share it so publicly.

Sequart Reprints: New Adventures of Jesus

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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Before Crumb, before Shelton, before the Zap! collective, there was the New Adventures of Jesus. It was created by Frank Stack, an art professor who drew the strips under the pseudonym of Foolbert Sturgeon. He was concerned that writing blasphemous tales of Christ would be frowned upon by his superiors--and worse yet, that he was drawing comic books. These days, Stack's best known by comics fans as a frequent collaborator of Harvey Pekar's. He drew the excellent Our Cancer Year with his now-trademark scratchy, cross-hatched and borderline grotesque style. Out of print for years, this edition collects all of the old stories and has a new one as well.

The Jesus stories came about as a result of his frustation with being in the army in the early 60's. Stationed near New York City, he fell in with assorted comics and art scene folks, including the likes of major influence Harvey Kurtzman, Terry Gilliam and Gilbert Shelton. He and Shelton knew each other from their days at the University of Texas, which was the incubator for much of what we know as the underground movement. Starting in about 1963, Stack started drawing retold & cheeky stories of Jesus for his friends. These eventually got collected and photocopied by Shelton back in Texas (making these the first mini-comics as well as the first undergrounds). When Shelton founded his own publishing concern, he printed six years worth of strips. Stack went on to to do a couple of other issues of Jesus comics during the late 60's and would continue to return to them from time to time.

Like a lot of humor from this era, what seemed groundbreaking & taboo at that time seems a bit quaint today. Humor that relied on shock value and drug references (like much of Shelton's material) as punchlines don't have much bite now. That's why I prefer Crumb's work from the 80's til now--he seemed to get a lot of that juvenalia out of his system. The best strips by Stack in this collection have a timeless quality. In some respects, his earliest strips were the funniest. These reimagine biblical tales, with funny retellings of Jesus being separated from his parents and hanging out in a temple. Contrasting the original story's account of Jesus being wise beyond his years, this story shows him as a wise-ass. Another funny story shows Jesus' confrontation with Satan in the desert, except that Jesus transforms himself into a camel and Satan looks like an idiot. My favorite is a silent strip that has Thomas reaching into Jesus' wound after he was resurrected--he kept reaching into Jesus' side until he had a shocked expression. Pulling out his hand, we see that Thomas has a mousetrap on his hand!

Stack notes that he was raised a christian, and it shows in the level of detail in his stories. There's a gentleness in his satire--Jesus is a sympathetic and very human figure. These stories are played for laughs, but they're really a clever updating of old tales. They lose none of their original power, but add the new dimension of being hilarious. Stack drew them in a quickly tossed-off scratchy style that adds to their charm. It's a style that reminds me of what Glen Dakin would do years later in his strip.

In his later stories, Stack brings Jesus into the 20th century. He used Jesus as a means of commenting on more contemporary issues, and as a result, some of the strips feel a bit dated. A story about Jesus being forced to join the army and go to Viet Nam actually works pretty well, as every attempt Jesus makes to get out of the service (showing off the stigmata, claiming to be the Prince of Peace) gets twisted around by the draft board. On the other hand, an extremely lengthy story about Jesus joining the faculty of a university is incredibly tedious. It's clear that Stack has an axe to grind and wanted to comment extensively on academia at the time (especially as how he experienced it), but the long party sequence feels like one long inside joke. Another clunker had Jesus joining the Reagan cabinet, and it just went to prove that most political humor has a short lifespan.

One of my favorite later strips include Jesus going to the movies and watching an action movie version of his story that is ridiculously over the top. We see a brawl between Jesus & John the Baptist over Mary Magdalene and a musclebound Jesus using the cross as a weapon to fight off the Romans and incite a revolution. Coming out of the theatre, someone says "The ending's not like the book." A grinning Jesus replies, "Believe me, it's better!" Another great later story sees Jesus coming back to earth, only to find it a burning cinder. God tells him to put it back together with the help of a Superman-figure in a story that feels like a cross between Feiffer and Kurtzman. Stack's latest stories, which feature Jesus in the suburbs trying to eke out a 9-to-5 existence, sell a sequel to the bible (his working title of "More Bible" wasn't wowing anyone), struggle to deal with intellectual property rights and figure out when to bring the last judgment.

For his later strips, Stack uses his mature style. Faces are heavily shadowed and cross-hatched, adding a certain grotesqueness to the proceedings. Stack manages to combine a loose sketchiness to his line with that cross-hatching & heavy use of shadow. This adds a tension to his work that is lacking in his later 60's art, which looks busier and more cluttered. That greater clarity allowed Stack a chance to breathe while setting up his jokes, which are a bit more sophisticated. In the end, it's Stack's wit, playfulness and thoughtfulness that make these stories work. It would have been easy to use Jesus just for the sake of shock, but he instead cleverly deploys him as a figure that comments on his surroundings. Some of those observations are more interesting now than others, and he certainly overplays his hand on some of them, but there's no question that Stack's affectionate development of Jesus as a fleshed-out, wise-cracking and very human character is what I enjoyed most about this book. Both in the bible and in this book, Jesus doesn't have any tolerance for hypocrites, hustlers and abusers of power.

Sequart Reprints: Scrublands

This article was originally written for sequart.com in 2006.
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It's hard to pin down Joe Daly's influences and hence what sort of comic Scrublands is. The book notes his strong influence by American underground artists like R.Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, S.Clay Wilson and others. While that's certainly the case, there's something entirely else going on in this book as well.

First of all, no matter how weird his stories get, there's a relaxed quality to them very much unlike the hyperactive and/or neurotic American underground artists. Second, while sex and drugs are pretty constant themes in his work, one gets the sense that he's not writing about them in order to shock. Instead, it's all very matter-of-fact--the sex, the drugs, the weirdness all seem to be a part of daily life. Breaking taboos for their own sake isn't really part of his agenda. Third, his background in animation has a big impact on the visual side of his presentation. He has a powerful command over his use of colors, making it a crucial part of the art. There's a simplicity in his style that makes it a lot easier for the eye to take in than a lot of hyperdetailed underground artists (Wilson's work in particular hurts my eyes). At the same time, his compositional choices and character design give the reader a lot of interesting things to look at.

The centerpiece of the book is "Prebaby", a lushly-illustrated and richly-colored trip detailing a blob-like fetal creature floating along a wild environment, eventually winding up impregnating a woman. It's a wordless tale that speaks to Daly's imagination, as this creature has to rely on the attentions of its environment in order to move, and encounters monsters, spirits and crews of tiny men (sperm?) who wind up rescuing it and setting it along its ultimate path of birth. The storytelling is assured as we amble from image to image, with many clearly seeming entirely extemporaneous. While this story is very much unlike anything else in the book on the surface, the underlying matter-of-factness surrounding its oddness puts it in very much in the same category as the more standard narratives and observations in the book.

Sex and drugs are more than just facts of life--they're things to be embraced in all their goopy weirdness. The visceral nature of sex in particular is a theme that's repeated throughout the book. One of my favorite bits in the book is "Aqua Boy". It starts off as yet another exploration of a warped landscape, this time underwater. Aqua Boy is a dead ringer for Tintin, going on a magical adventure. He's rescued from a predicament by his father, only to have the mundane but tragic intrude: he's told by his father that he's divorcing his mother, and "you're going to go away and live with your mother in a smaller 'less cool' aqua craft". Of course, later on, a ghost fish tells Aqua Boy that he's gotten his pubes, and would now be able to breathe underwater. When Aqua Boy thanks him for the information, the fish thanks him for hallucinating him into existence! Once again, the dryness of the humor set against the unexpectedly weird elements creates an atmosphere where the reader has no idea what's coming next.

The element that sets Scrublands apart is the way that Daly's Cape Town becomes a background character of sorts. From a sardonic "appreciation" of a beach community to Daly and his alter egos walking around a sun-beaten city to a freak-ridden series of encounters in a supermarket, Cape Town is a visceral, vibrant, sweaty and gritty presence. Of course, these stories are slightly eccentric slices of life compared to "Art Lover" or "Wallchild". The latter stories feature his frequently-used comedy duo of Kobosh & Steve. Kobosh wears an elaborate headdress and almost looks like a superhero, while Steve is the de facto straight man. "Art Lover" features Steve creating a work of art that looks like a cross between a breast and an ass that's being judged by his teacher; when the teacher comes across Kobosh having sex with it in public, he gives Steve an A+! "Wallchild" is very matter of fact: Kobosh is sitting on his couch and watches the wall give birth. He and Steve develop milk-engorged breasts so as to nurse the Wallchild. The end. That one-page strip personifies the straight-faced and unapologetic weirdness that Daly does so well.

What I like most about Daly is his sense of playfulness. While the whole book is funny, there aren't a lot of gags per se. Stories like "Prebaby" instead have a sense of absurdity that make them a lot of fun to read, while not losing any of their readability. Stories about micro-fauna living on Bruce Springsteen's head make complete sense in the context of the rest of the book. Alienation is a constant running sub-theme of the book, but it's muted by the fact that its characters embrace the constant weirdness of the world. The end result is a collection of strips that feels familiar to an alt-comics reader, yet doesn't quite fit into an established niche.

Autobio Minis: MariNaomi, Whitney Taylor, Margo Dabaie

Here's a trio of autobio comics, done in different styles.

The Evil, by MariNaomi. This is a short, punchy comic that sees the artist experimenting with a new approach. Instead of her standard four panel grid, she's now using a single image per page. Some of those images are naturalistic, while others are rendered in her new, ultra-minimalist style. This allows her to pull in and zoom out of extreme emotional states. The story follows a stay in a hotel as she hears a couple arguing very loudly in the room next door. What follows is a mix of the bizzarely comedic and emotionally triggering, as an aged security guard slowly ambles his way into her room and then down the hall, while Mari herself is weeping. She's weeping because she's being chased by the ghosts of boyfriends past, in the sense that she was on the opposite end of this scenario when younger--being threatened by abusive boyfriends. It's a pointed story about what responsibilities we have toward our fellow people weighed against the concerns of privacy, mixed with alternating chords of guilt and anger that no one called the cops on her behalf in the past. It's a typically nuanced, powerful and funny take on a troubling subject by an artist who's really on a roll.

Adult Time, by Whitney Taylor. Taylor is in the unenviable position of desperately wanting to be a full-time cartoonist but finding herself shackled to a completely unrelated career. Now that she's completed grad school and is yoked to that job full time, Taylor seems to have taken on a new commitment to comics, and her work has slowly matured and started to take shape as she finds her own personal style. This comic is devoted to the scary idea of being an adult and suddenly, magically shifting one's focus from the interests of youth to the realities of being a professional. I like the fact that she drew many of these comics at her cubicle; it's where many an inspired idea has been scribbled. Taylor shows off her sense of humor in this mini in strips about going to a wine tasting that include ridiculing the jargon of tasting ("like a garlicky fettucine alfredo with an asphalt mouthfeel") that ends with a surprisingly dirty joke at the end. Her "Field Guide To Adult Time" is an a to z primer that's both heartfelt & funny; it also features some of her best drawing. Taylor's self-deprecatory nature serves her well in strips about going to weddings and accidentally friending her ex-boyfriend's girlfriend on Facebook. Taylor's voice as a storyteller is starting to emerge as an especially sharp and funny one, and her art is starting to better match what she's trying to accomplish on the page. My sense is that 2013 will be a year of important growth for her as an artist.

He Also Has Drills For Hands V2, by Marguerite Dabaie. Dabaie's devotion to drawing a daily strip is such that she managed to do it during graduate school. These strips are a departure from her more intricate, detailed comics, with a sketchy and cartoony line being deployed. Debaie is a good enough draftsman to not worry about getting too fussy with her drawings; instead, she's after a punchline or getting across a basic idea. Dabaie goes from the silly (a dirty joke done on a calculator) to the quotidian (making stew) to the anecdotal (accounts of movies being made in her neighborhood) to the intellectual (pondering differences in languages). There's an easy charm to her work that makes reading these a pleasure, even if it's fairly disposable, breezy work compared to her other projects. Still, it's interesting to see an artist's process in forcing herself to draw and clearly find ways to enjoy that experience.

Sequart Reprints: Macedonia

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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You have to hand it to Harvey Pekar. After the success of his movie and the sales of the American Splendor collections, Ballantine gave him the opportunity to do three new graphic novels. The first was Our Movie Year, which was self-explanatory. It was less a single coherent work than a collection of stories he had already done elsewhere related to the movie, plus some new work. These were classic American Splendor stories, featuring quotidian experiences and observations by Pekar. For his other two books, he went in a very different direction. For Ego and Malice, he told the story of someone he had met who he found fascinating. Harv's done this sort of thing before, because he's always been as interested in telling someone else's story as much as his own. Macedonia, however, is a bit different.

Pekar has always been a working-class intellectual, and politics have always been part of what he's written about. It's no surprise that one of his most frequent collaborators has been Joe Sacco, the preeminent narrative political journalist in comics. Sacco's masterwork is Safe Area Gorazde, about the near-destruction of a mostly Muslim town in Eastern Bosnia. Sacco lived in Gorazde, talked to its residents, and told their story through a series of sharply-created vignettes. The book was not just about war, but about the nature of ethnic conflict and the mania it inspires. When Pekar learned about Roberson, an undergrad at Cal-Berkeley, and the nature of her research, he realized that he could create a story that would be a sort of mirror image of what Sacco did.

Roberson was a Peace Studies major and when she got into an argument about the inevitability of war, she brought up the example of Macedonia. Conditions were in place for an ethnic civil war to erupt in this Balkan state and tensions were certainly high. However, it didn't happen, and Roberson decided to travel there for her thesis project to talk to as many people as possible as to why. Pekar asked if he could see her notes when she returned from her trip, and created a script that Ed Piskor illustrated. I did an interview with Piskor about the Macedonia gig, where he described some of the special challenges involved.

There's a pleasantly rambling nature to the narrative that reflects the fact that Roberson went over to Macedonia not knowing a single person, nor establishing a single contact. This was kind of a crazy way to approach the experience, but it was calculated to a certain extent. After all, her entire thesis revolved around the idea of the rule of law having a primary role in establishing peace between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians. She wanted to test the accessibility of state organs that anyone should be able to turn to so as to avoid disputes.

Roberson does indeed quickly make contacts, including with a local artist who was leading a disarmament campaign. She makes instant bonds with several deans and professors from Southeastern European University, built for Albanians. Part of the reason why an agreement was reached between the two sides was that an access to education was promised for Albanians, along with a police force that was representative of demographic realities in a given area. Roberson was able to speak to a police trainer about this topic. One reason why Roberson was able to gain this kind of access was that many people she talked to were eager for contact from the outside world. They wanted their stories told, wanted to feel like part of the greater world community rather than an isolated state.

Roberson may be an idealist, but she wasn't starry-eyed in what she saw. Tensions still existed. Disarmament was still a process. Macedonians thought the worst of Albanians, treating them as savages. Albanians, given a leg up in certain areas, didn't exactly turn the other cheek. The possibility of violence was always there. She spoke to plenty of folks on the street about what they saw, in addition to officials who were trying to put the best face on things. Despite those difficulties, one thing was abundantly clear: war would have only made things worse, not better. A quick trip across the border to Kosovo made that abundantly clear.

As a comic, Macedonia has certain bumps. One reason why Sacco is so successful with his projects is that he is the reporter, writer and artist. With Macedonia, the comic is a couple of levels removed from Roberson's actual experience. Pekar boiled down her notes and conversations to a script, and Piskor had to take something that was a long series of talking heads into something interesting to look at that also flowed as a story. In addition to the static nature of the story, Piskor had the additional task of somehow illustrating page after page of background information on an enormously complex conflict. The beginning of the book drags as a result of Roberson giving us the history of the conflict in the form of a conversation with her boyfriend, and Piskor runs with this conversation and shows them driving around, cooking--in motion, giving the reader something to look at.

The lack of structure in the narrative also hurts the flow as a reader. Some kind of arbitrary chapter breaks might have been a good idea or perhaps reorganizing the narrative into a series of vignettes like Safe Area Gorazde. That said, Pekar's skill as a writer really comes to the fore in the last forty or so pages. His ability to bring to life the variety of characters Roberson encounters is Pekar at his best. In particular, the French professor Fabian was hilarious--a nasty cynic who was nonetheless enormously generous. Pekar has always especially excelled at fish-out-of-water stories, and Piskor's non-idealized character designs are a perfect match for the odd people that Roberson meets.

Though Macedonia has some structural and narrative problems, its scope and ambition are both remarkable. After the first forty pages, the book starts to build momentum. In the last forty or fifty pages, the reader is totally swept up into Roberson's experiences and the people she meets, and there's a tangible sadness when she has to leave. The last page sums up the themes of the book, as Heather notes that she left herself vulnerable in trusting others, but the result was meeting dozens of people who were enormously kind and generous to her. She was amazed at the openness and frankness of those she met, something she missed at Cal. Saying, "I'd rather end up bruised than untouched", she sums up not just her own outlook on life, but also the outlook necessary for not just peace, but understanding, to blossom in Macedonia.

Catching Up With Caitlin Cass

Caitlin Cass continues to crank out comics inspired by the life of the mind. Her Postal Constituency and its schedule means that something comes a reader's way every couple of months, even if it's not directly related to the story at hand. She's doing her first extended series, called The Index, which is a sort of synthesis of the ideas she's presented in her other comics in the context of a relationship. The story is about a man and a woman living together (platonically, the reader is to assume). She has vast amounts of blank index cards that she keeps as a soothing reminder of her own insignificance. He starts to fill them out because it reminds him of his own inability to finish anything. The second issue finds him soothing himself by filling the cards with anything; the content is irrelevant because his project is to fill them with everything. Thus, any content at all counts. She is driven crazy by her nice white cards suddenly being filled up and strikes back by giving him a card telling the story of Paul Otlet, a functionary who seized upon the idea of coming up with an organizational system of Everything, spending his time answering questions about organization and indices.

Cass depicts that idea as a kind of virus that infects the man's thinking, making him start to organize his index cards. While she hoped this would deter him from continuing, he simply transfers the idea from a sort of nihilistic gathering of information to his own model of his consciousness. Cass reminds us in a card that's Volume 3, #10 of the Constituency that we are stuck between the infinitely small and infinitely large; a gigantic fulcrum point experienced by every individual. It's titled "Lest We Forget" and also refers back to the man's project as hopeless. Of course, the very hopelessness of the project is why he draws comfort from it. Knowing that he could never draw near to finishing it means he won't ever have to confront his inability to finish anything. Like Xeno, he's never able to let his arrow fly from bow to target, seeing that gulf as an infinite divide. That's why the woman is content to stupidly gaze into the infinite, not worrying that her life is not an exceptional one because no experience is exceptional in the face of the infinite."Infinite Regress", #9 of the Constituency, is a construction where the reader is asked to tape together the comic in such a way that it forms a cuboid object. Where one starts and where one ends is arbitrary once the comic is read, but it addresses what is not spoken of in the comic: how the two relate to each other as humans and how their mutual decisions to overintellectualize their daily lives serves as an infinite buffer to emotions.

Continuing on that theme in the book of etchings Contribution, Cass' art is at her most beautiful. Generally, her figure drawing is functional at best, but she really went out of her way to create something beautiful here. This silent story features familiar imagery for Cass: academics working in primordial muck and ooze in an effort to create new ideas or at least crank out work. It's a hellish factory grind of a world that has a number of casualties, yet the nimble of mind can persist and break free. It's a fascinating comic because Cass is clearly as suspicious of her background wherein she was taught directly from the Great Books of the Western World as she is taken by it. Anyone who's spent time in grad school knows that the "school" part is a small component of the overall grind. As an artist, Cass is getting better as she continues to simplify her line and concentrate on making individual images come alive. The Index is a project worthy of her extended time and attention, and I suspect she'll be a different artist when she comes out the other side.