Perfect Example by John Porcellino

When you self-publish a comic on any kind of regular basis, you tend to pour all of your creative work into that one outlet. (I don't think there's anything similar in other art forms - non-comics 'zines, maybe, but that feels like a variation of the same idea. Very few media have both the low barrier for entry and the potential/audience to run for an extended period of time that comics do.)

John Porcellino has been making comics and publishing them as King-Cat Comics since 1989; he's done other projects occasionally - the only entirely separate book-length one I know of is Thoreau at Walden - but most of his work gets funneled into that one outlet, for all the obvious reasons.

There are books that generally reprint King-Cat: I've seen two of them in the life of this blog, Map of My Heart and From Lone Mountain. But Porcellino or his editors at Drawn & Quarterly have also pulled out selections that are more graphic-novel-shaped from the long King-Cat archives, including The Hospital Suite and Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man (which I'm pretty sure I read, probably as my first Porcellino, but I can't find any record of it).

Perfect Example is another book like that: it collects the four-part story of the title, plus two other shorter pieces, and a one-pager to open it all up. All this material is from the mid-90s, but it all looks back a decade, to the summer right after Porcellino graduated high school in 1986, in the Chicago suburb Hoffman Estates. D&Q published this package in 2021.

Descriptions of this book can lean into the "aimless teen" cliché - that's not completely untrue, but not everyone has an aim automatically. (Maybe most of us don't.) It is day-to-day, matter-of-fact, about what John and his friends were getting up to that summer - driving around, going to parties, starting relationships, meeting new people, going to concerts (or trying to), all that kind of thing. The exact details aren't as important as the feelings and the motion.

If you've read Porcellino's work before, you know he's had some mental health issues - anxiety, depression, that whole sad ball of wax. This is, to be all comics about it, something like his origin story - or, at least, a time when that was starting and young Porcellino realized it at the time.

Like all of Porcellino's work, Perfect Example is full of clean, single-weight lines in hand-drawn boxes, with a very minicomics, personal look. His writing is focused and minimalist as well: he's not trying to tell a story, but to capture what he was doing, and what it felt like, moment by moment.

Porcellino is a cartoonist of moments: that's how I'd put it. Good ones, bad ones, points of connection and of disconnection - how this one young man was living in the world, what he cared about, and how his own brain was undermining him along the way. This book is a collection of those moments, all from that one summer, organized and arranged to show what Porcellino was like then. I don't know of any other cartoonist who can do this kind of tone and style: simple, unadorned, precise, thoughtful, ruminative, open.