From Lone Mountain by John Porcellino

Sometimes it can be hard to tell if I don't understand something, or if I'm just not paying attention. The recent publishing history of comics' own Zen master, John Porcellino, [1] for example. He's been self-publishing King-Cat Comics since 1989, each issue more-or-less as soon as he has enough new pages to do so. [2] And it looks like Drawn & Quarterly is collecting batches of those comics, starting this century, at some kind of delay.

So Map of My Heart collected pretty much all of King-Cat 51-61, after a (larger?) book called King-Cat Classix gathered the best stories from the first fifty issues. He's also done books that didn't come as obviously out of King-Cat - some pieces might have appeared there, in other forms - like The Hospital Suite.

And I just read 2018's From Lone Mountain, the direct follow-up to Map, collecting King-Cat issues 62-68, originally published individually from 2003-07. Lone was a decade after Map, but still only gets us up to fifteen years ago...I may be arguing my way around to wanting another big Porcellino book immediately. I'm not going to get it, clearly. And that kind of demand is wildly the wrong reaction to Porcellino's quiet, contemplative, inner- and nature-focused work.

But letting go of desire is hard, as we all know. And that question is pretty central to his work, so it's not inappropriate for me to be grappling with the same things that motivate his comics. It's like a Zen koan about the desire to always have more Zen koans.

Porcellino's comics, here as elsewhere, are deeply personal, resolutely individual, and simply precise, carefully chosen moments and thoughts from a messy, often difficult life - Porcellino had multiple major health issues throughout his twenties and thirties, and I don't know if that's all "handled" now - presented in single-width, crisp lines and lettering exactly the same width, too. If I wanted to be reductive, I could call King-Cat a catalog of his coping strategies, especially for his OCD - that wouldn't be exactly wrong, but we're all coping with life, aren't we? Most of us don't make profound, often electrifying art about it for thirty-plus years.

In the years cataloged here, Porcellino moved from his native Chicago area first to Denver and then to San Francisco, and then back to Denver. He got married, for the second time. His beloved cat, Maisie, almost as close to being the central character of King-Cat as Porcellino himself, died. His father died. A lot of other real-world things happened, to him and around him, some of which he makes comics about and some of which he mostly ignores.

More importantly, he walked a lot. He examined plants and thought about Zen stories. He read books and listened to music. He lived in a world, and tried to express that living in art. This is the result. And it is a wonderful book for any of us who are equally trying to live in a big, often unpleasant world, trying to make sense of it all and find balance and peace and understanding. Porcellino can help show the way, to a thoughtful awareness of life and appreciation of what we actually have, all of the positives and negatives of life, all of its pains and pleasures and inexpressible moments.

[1] My fingers always want to swap around the second and third letters of his last name, and I apologize if any such typos sneak in here.

[2] Which averages out to "annual" for what looks like the past twenty-five years or so. But he's now up to issue 82 - just came out last month! - so he must have been a lot quicker in the very early days.