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IN.

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Guest Review by Maura Spiegel   The Edinburgh, Scotland-based New Yorker cartoonist, Will McPhail, is not the first to wonder what our psychic life would look like if we could draw it, but he does something quite special with the idea in IN.  His narrator/protagonist, Nick Ross, is an artist who spends a lot of time in hipster coffee places and suffers from an inability to establish authentic connections with others; it all feels like performance to him.   The witty portrayal of his muted black and white existence explodes into color when a superficial exchange with the plumber fixing his… Read More

Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics

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Miriam Engelberg was diagnosed as having breast cancer at the age of 43. She was a computer programmer working in the non profit sector and loved comics, in fact, influenced by Peter Kuper and Harvey Pekar, she drew strip cartoons about her work and published them on line. Obviously a creative and introspective individual, she had previously written monologues and plays about various interests and aspects of her life. When cancer was diagnosed she started to draw cartoon strips about her experiences. A couple of things set this work apart from Cancer Vixen: unlike Marissa Marchetto, Engelberg was not a trained… Read More

Mom’s Cancer

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Brian Fies originally chronicled his family’s struggle to come to terms with their mother’s metastatic cancer in an anonymous serialised web comic. He had no idea how the story would end when he started posting it, but he hoped that others similarly affected would find some comfort in knowing they were not alone. Reader numbers increased by word of mouth (or email) recommendation and the strip was picked up and published as a hardback book in 2006. It has subsequently won several awards, including an Eisner. It is a beautifully produced book, with understated graphics, mostly in black and white… Read More

American Splendour (sic)

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A real-life file clerk in a Cleveland hospital, Pekar has been documenting the quotidian idiosyncrasies of his day-to-day life and work since 1976 in the cult comic series American Splendor. One of the first writers to think that everyday life could provide the basis for comic book stories, Pekar is interesting in the way he goes about making comics, writing the storyline , hiring various cartoonists (most notably Robert Crumb) to do the drawing, and then publishing and distributing the comics himself. British cartoonist Colin Warneford, who has Asberger’s syndrome (or “high functioning” autism) contacted Pekar and they collaborated on… Read More