Wild That We're Alive by Lauren Haldeman

Every book is from a particular person, with a distinctive point of view. The best authors realize that, and are as deeply themselves as they can be, to emphasize the things only they would say, in the ways only they would say it.

Wild That We're Alive is a collection of diary comics, from one woman, mostly about her family life. It's not anything at all like that description would make you think it is - some hybrid of Erma Bombeck and James Kochalka - because that's not who Lauren Haldeman is.

Haldeman is a poet - with several awards and a pedigree from the University of Iowa, so I don't just mean "someone who has written some poetry" - a web designer, editor, painter, and obviously a maker of comics. But what I think is the key fact is that she's the kind of person who has one child, and that child is named Magnus.

There's a kind of mom who has five or more kids, all named things like Jacob and Hannah. There's a kind of mom who has two or three kids, with names you can't predict. And there's a kind of mom who has just one, with a name like Magnus or Tinkerbell.

Magnus is a character here, appearing in a number of comics. Haldeman's husband, Ben, is mentioned but less present. But they're all about her: these are diary comics. Each one is generally a single image, captioned or with dialogue - one image for a single moment, a single thought. Haldeman works in big blocks of generally light, soothing colors, and a bold, expressive, individualistic line.

She draws people somewhat anthropomorphically - maybe dogs, maybe bipedal kangaroos? - with herself central in most of these comics. They're about what's it's like to be Lauren Haldeman in the world, sometimes the physical world but even more often her mental world. I think Haldeman is the kind of person who never stops thinking about things, even when she wants to be quieter and just present. (Ask me why I recognize that.) She doesn't always provide context: there are a number of comics about grief, but we never learn who Haldeman is grieving, how recent the loss was, or anything like that. They're all from her point of view, so things she already knows likely won't be mentioned.

Wild That We're Alive is organized as a year. After a brief introductory section about her family and animals, Haldeman mentions she thinks of years as beginning in the fall - she seems to still be embedded in the academic year, from her work with the University of Iowa and maybe other academic-related web-design work. So the book follows that flow, with full-page paintings for half-titles (and occasionally elsewhere) leading into sections of comics from that time of year.

I think this was a project, a daily comic Haldeman did. Maybe for one particular year, maybe off and on for several years. I don't see it on her website, so maybe it was mostly on social media, in the way a lot of comics-makers do these days. (If the eyeballs are on Instagram, it only makes sense to post there first.)

I'm not the first person to point out that poets and comic-writers need to have a similar level of concision, of using exactly the right word in a space where there's only room for a few words. Haldeman is a great example of that; her language is precise and thoughtful, but also conversational and playful - not "poetry" in the old academic "study-this" sense, but poetic in the allusive, connected, word-besotted sense.

At times, Haldeman feels like a higher-brow version of Grant Snider - similar concerns about internal emotional states and the purpose of life, but pitched in a mindset informed by more of the academic world and with some weltschmerz behind it. I like Snider, and I like a more rigorous thought-pattern, so both of those things are good.

To close as I started, Haldeman is particular and distinctive: that's good in and of itself, even more so because she has interesting thoughts and makes striking pictures about them.

Roughing It by Mark Twain

I've vaguely wanted to re-read Roughing It for a few years now. The last time the urge rose, I didn't have a copy on hand and read Life on the Mississippi instead, but, this time, availability and interest coincided. (I read it in the Library of America omnibus with The Innocents Abroad, which is what I linked from the title above.)

This will not be any kind of formal review or critical evaluation: I've been out of the editorial mills for two decades and, even then, was much more focused on commercial possibilities than literary analysis. But Roughing It is a wonderfully fun book, a collection of almost-random pieces by a young writer still discovering what he can do, and I hope I can inspire some new readers to pick it up.

As an old editorial hand, what struck me this time was how much of a second book this is. Twain had traveled to Europe and "the Holy Land" as a newspaper correspondent in 1867, then turned his newspaper columns into the very successful The Innocents Abroad.

Here I want to note that Roughing It has sometimes been published as The Innocents at Home, from which we can all take the lesson that publishers were always the same, ready to take advantage of any opportunity they could see or manufacture. (And good for them!)

Innocents was a major travel book, one that helped define what was a nascent genre in the late 19th century. It covered one trip, of about a half-year duration, with a consistent "cast" and something like a plotline supplied by the itinerary of the ship. Roughing It, on the other hand, isn't any of those things. To me, it reads like a publisher, or maybe Twain himself, asked "what else do you have like Innocents?" and the answer was "everything!"

Roughing It covers seven years of Twain's life - parts of it in greater detail than others. Mississippi, almost a decade later, went back to the years just before that, when he was a steamboat pilot on the big river, but the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to that career.

Twain doesn't mention either the War or his riverboat piloting in Roughing It. He begins with the journey - his older brother Orion was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and Twain (in his civilian guise as Sam Clemens) was Orion's personal secretary. The trip across the country - and out of the country, because Nevada and nearby regions were all territories and not states in those days, half-wilderness and thinly populated - takes up the first fifth of the book, a long journey by stagecoach from Missouri, full of local color, stories about Indians and bandits, and lots of details of what that kind of trip was like, for an audience that was already forgetting it with the rise of the railroad. There's also something of a sidebar about Utah and the Mormons, since Twain and company stopped in Salt Lake City for a break on their way to Nevada.

From there, it looks like Roughing It will be the story of Twain's life in that Nevada territory, during the years of silver mania. Twain does some mining for silver himself, and - like most of the population - spends even more time and energy speculating in stock certificates from various mines and getting caught up in various manias, all of which are guaranteed to make him fabulously rich right up into the moment where the whole thing falls apart and he's left with worthless paper.

But Twain gets himself into newspaper work in the middle of this time, and the book starts shifting - first to various fictional or non-fictional stories about colorful figures of the area: miners, criminals, and lawmen. Then Twain himself heads off to San Francisco, for reasons that are clear enough to him at the time, and the last third or so of the book is very miscellaneous, covering the next three or four years in patchwork form. There's a long trip to the "Sandwich Islands" (Hawaii) that takes up almost the last hundred pages, which is the most like Innocents, though without the actual tour-company compatriots that Twain got so much material out of for the previous book.

So Roughing It is a book of parts: the trip West, mining in Nevada, newspaper work there and in San Francisco, and finally the big Hawaii trip. Twain papers over the discontinuities, which means many  chapters start with something like "After a three months' absence, I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent." (From Chapter LXII) The early material - about the journey and silver-mining - are stronger and more focused than the back half of the book, so one can wish that some editor had been able to get Twain to a shorter, tighter book. (But how often is that the wish, with so many writers.)

I still think of Roughing It as my favorite Twain book: it has all of his strengths and little of the sourness that came into his work later in life. It's full of tall tales, real and invented, and details of life in several places and times of great interest. One thing the book won't tell you, but is fascinating in retrospect, is that during most of this period the Civil War was raging a thousand or so miles east of Twain and his silver-mining adventures. The world is big; even when there's an Obvious Story going on, individuals have their own stories - and they're often completely unrelated.

Ordinary Victories, Vol.4: Swing That Hammer by Manu Larcenet

Digital books have a lot of advantages - they can be cheaper, they're definitely lighter, you can fit many more of them in the same space, they can be accessed almost immediately from almost anywhere, and so forth. But they can also mysteriously disappear in a way that never happens with physical books.

The publishing consortium Europe Comics - which, as I understand it, is somewhere between a rights clearing-house and a pan-company cooperative project - went through some upheavals three years ago. (He said, understating the case.) See their website for the confusing announcement that they would continue to release a few books a month but would stop all "consumer-facing activities." [1] At the same time, everything from Europe disappeared overnight from the app my library uses, including several dozen things I'd flagged that I wanted to read.

That was sad, but I resigned myself to it, and have been reading other things.

And then I stumbled across a book that used to be on my list, and discovered that, at some point in the past two years, the corpus of Europe Comics had miraculously reappeared on the Hoopla app. I spent some happy time re-flagging things that I probably had flagged before - who can remember, exactly? - and tried to think if I was in the middle of anything at the time.

There was one series that I'd almost finished in 2023: Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet, a transmuted memoir about a photographer named Marco, the shipyard where his father used to work, his newish partner and the birth and first years of their first child. It was a four-book series - originally published in French in the Aughts, translated into English once soon afterward, and then again around 2016 for this four-volume edition, in a naturalistic tone I've really liked by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

The first three were Ordinary Victories, Trivial Quantities, and Precious Things. The fourth, final book is Swing That Hammer.

Swing has the same low-key, everyday feeling as the earlier books. It's well-observed, personal, specific - but small, in the way that any one life is small. This book sees a lot of major changes: Marco and Emily's daughter is getting big enough to talk and wander about and ask questions, the shipyard is finally closing down for good to be redeveloped, and an elderly neighbor Marco had befriended is suddenly gone. There's more than that, but those are the major points: like any life, it keeps going, and things keep changing. Swing has less to do with Marco's career than the earlier books; it's more focused on his personal life.

Larcenet's art is still wonderful here, with an ease and grace to his line and characters that are full of life. The whole series is warm and true and real - not quite autobiography, but close to it, an alternate-world version of the real Larcenet's life, told cleanly and with clear vision and a quiet sense of time and space. I recommend the whole series - especially now that they're back - to anyone who likes comics about real people living real lives.

[1] I think I've said this in the past, but, just to be clear: releasing a book is part of publishing. But it's not the most important part. Getting that book in front of an audience - all of those "consumer-facing activities" - are at least as important to the publishing process as shoving content onto pages (dead-tree or electronic). Of course, Europe Comics is not primarily an enterprise aimed at consumers to begin with - it's largely a proof-of-concept for the books it does, and its goal is for bigger companies to buy the rights, so Europe can take down their editions and someone else actually publish the book with a bigger splash. So their change wasn't strange in retrospect, but it is definitely odd if you think of them as a publisher.

This Country by Navied Mahdavian

Navied Mahdavian was a fifth-grade teacher in San Francisco, married to a documentary filmmaker. He wanted to be a cartoonist, but the go-go needs of life in the SF Bay frustrated that ambition. He and his wife, Emilie, had had a good vacation trip to rural Idaho, where land was cheap, and so they thought - why don't we just move there?

They did, in late 2016, buying six acres, uprooting their lives, and having a small house built and delivered to their new home. And they discovered that, if there ever was a good time for two urbanities (and their dog) with typically urban careers - one of them a brown-skinned man with a big beard and a "foreign" name - to move to the most deeply conservative and xenophobic part of the country, near the end of the 2016 election season was somewhat more...problematic.

This Country tells the story of their three years on that land, from their first night in a tent through their efforts at farming and fertility struggles, until they decided to go live somewhere else. And, I should say, the locals were definitely friendly, in their way. They gave advice, generally useful and often blunt. They asked Mahdavian politely if he was a Muslim, and generally seem to have assumed that, if he was, he was one of the good ones. They treated Mahdavian and his wife much like they treated everyone else. They included him in their paranoid conversations about secret ISIS training camps nearby. Some of them became personal friends, and all of them were helpful, in that way people have in thinly-populated areas where any crisis must be handled by whoever's already there. They felt comfortable enough to throw around major slurs when talking to him. They encouraged vegetarian Mahdavian to go hunting with them.

What they didn't do - and Mahdavian doesn't say this outright - is adjust the way they thought and acted and spoke the tiniest bit ever, at any time, when interacting with Mahdavian and his wife. And that, as anyone othered in any context can attest, is exhausting.

That could be one marker of liberal vs. conservative, I suppose: the cartoon version is that liberals bend over backwards to "include" others, no matter what convolutions they have to go through from moment to moment in doing so, while conservatives refuse to change anything about themselves ever, gleefully doubling-down on their worst aspects and making those the core of their personalities.

On the other hand, rural Idaho is thinly populated. Mahdavian could go days without seeing anyone other than his wife. It was gorgeous, and it gave them three years to live on and be part of their own land - seeing the seasons pass, learning the local animals, working hard to make raised beds and try to grow their own food. (It didn't work: I think that never works, for individuals trying it in Year One. You can only grow food to live on on the first try if you're supported in a community that already knows how.) It was lovely, and Mahdavian and his wife would have been happy to stick it out there, among the locals who didn't mean to be rude and racist, and spend their lives there.

But they also wanted to raise a family. In the last section of this book, we see their fertility problems, and the treatments they went through. And that struggle led to the reason they decided to leave Idaho. I probably shouldn't blatantly tell you, since that's as close to "spoiling" the ending as a cartoon non-fiction memoir can get, but it did have to do with their desire for a family, and what it would mean to have a family in that place, among those people.

Mahdavian tells this story quietly, in soft tones. His people have dot eyes but expressive faces. His landscapes stretch out across the page, to show the attractiveness of this land. He balances showing us their lives and telling us about it well - looking back, I think of this book as mostly not narrated, but, looking through pages, there are captions all over the place. But they don't intrude; they don't tell us things that we can see - they set the scene or give context or explain the non-visual aspects of their Idaho life.

And, more importantly, This Country tells an important story: of who gets to be "here," who gets to be comfortable, where home is and who gets to have a home. Without preaching, without complaining, looking clearly at these Idaho locals who I think Mahdavian and his wife had a lot of affection for.

America is a land that used to be famous for telling the world that anyone could be welcome here. One end of the political spectrum has given up on that, while pretending they're more patriotic than the rest of us.  But there's nothing more patriotic than a nation's best image of itself - there can be nothing more patriotic than that. They are liars and charlatans, because they have turned away from what their country can be and what it has striven to be for two hundred and fifty years. Places like rural Idaho will always be insular - small places far away can't help that. But they don't have to be unwelcoming. They don't have to curdle with paranoia and xenophobia, the way rural Idaho and a thousand other pockets of America have. That was deliberate, that was caused, that is someone's fault.

Sometimes I wish I believed in Hell, so I could have an appropriate expectation for people who deliberately stirred up hate and division so they could make a little more money and get a little more power. I don't, though. Those people will just die, like all of us. If we're lucky, they will thoroughly die, and be as forgotten as possible. In the meantime, I prefer to focus on the positive - on books like This Country.

Class Clown by Dave Barry

Dave Barry has written a lot of books over the years, and plenty of other things, but he hasn't written a memoir before. However, every successful writer who lives long enough finds the pull of "tell us your fascinating life story" to be unavoidable, and so Barry's new book for 2025 was the story of Who He Is and How He Came To Be.

(He's a guy from Armonk, NY who went into the newspaper business when that was thriving, had a knack for humor that he relentlessly cultivated for decades, and expanded his empire through hard work and a newspaperman's gleeful disdain for hate mail, as a very high-level overview.)

Class Clown is that story, subtitled both "The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass" and "How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up." It's fairly short and zippy, like all of Barry's writing: he trained early on writing copy that people would want to finish rather than flipping the page to the bridge column or the weather report, and he still has that facility and the goofball tone he's cultivated over the years. (Standard disclaimer here that writing short, zippy, and breezy is vastly harder than it looks: it takes a lot of work to be effortlessly readable.)

This has some elements of Standard Boomer Memoir, since Barry is a Boomer and that's the life he lived. It comes out most strongly in the first couple of chapters, about his childhood and parents and schooling, which were, in his telling, about as wonderful as anything was possible to ever be. (Memoirs are very binary: a childhood was either idyllic or horrific. Barry falls on the former end.) Barry doesn't belabor the point, and he does get into some negative things about his parents briefly, mostly after he grew up. But you will get the usual joke about Duck and Cover, among other old favorites.

Most of the book is about his career, though, since that's what his audience cares about. Barry had a syndicated newspaper column for around twenty years (1983 to 2005, in retrospect the high-water mark of newspaper domination of the media scene), and turned columns into books almost immediately, putting out a nearly-annual string of bestsellers that were all-new material (I will guestimate) about half of the time. He even became a novelist - I remember really liking his first two, Carl Hiaasen-esque kitchen-sink Florida thrillers, though I have one more unread book in that vein sitting on my shelf and he's written a bunch of other fiction (alone and in collaboration) that I haven't gotten to.

Barry tells us about all those things, plus the lousy rock group of famous authors, the Rock Bottom Remainders, that he's been part of for thirtyish years, the TV show made from his work in the '90s - no, really, he was that famous that Harry Anderson played him weekly on TV for multiple seasons. Barry has had what seems like an interesting life, and he's not precious about it: he comes across as frankly amazed about some of the things he's done (wrote for Steve Martin hosting the Oscars! his second TV appearance, for his first, small-published book, was on Johnny Carson!) and really happy that he got to make jokes in public so long and in so many ways.

Again, Barry was lucky enough to write during the great zenith of the newspaper columnist, and I think he realizes that. He had a huge audience, and he kept it engaged - and knew exactly how to do it, as I will illustrate with a quote from pp.118-119:

Not to toot my own horn, but I was the only nationally syndicated columnist, and I include George Will in this statement, willing to write consistently about toilet-related issues. My readers appreciated this and were always sending me relevant articles clipped from their local newspapers. If a toilet exploded anywhere in the English-speaking world, or a snake showed up in a toilet - you'd be surprised how often these things happen - there was an excellent chance my readers would alert me.

The only potentially upsetting or contentious stuff - other than from the kind of readers who sent angry letters about his booger jokes or causal mocking of Neil Diamond or random negative references to their city or state - is the chapter on Politics. Barry covered the presidential race, in his usual joking manner, from 1984 through 2016, and he has the old-time newspaperman's disdain for both politicians and the way newspapermen cover them. (He notes midway through this chapter that he's a libertarian, which absolutely tracks - though I would have hoped for a bit more engagement from the son of a man who was both a Presbyterian minister and a leader of the New York City Mission Society. Barry even attended the 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech as a guest of the Urban League; I will note that he doesn't seem to be the modern, racist kind of libertarian.) It was all the same sort of thing, as he tells it, until Trump came along and everything got ruined. He appears to be willing to maybe allow that some of the ruin is due to Trump directly - he claims to hate Trump, in the way that rich older white guys in red states with outdated vaguely liberal credentials do claim - but also thinks that the media was just too hard on the poor fella, which caused him to win. I wonder if he would say the same today.

But Class Clown is 99% funny stuff, as expected. Barry has been funny consistently in public for about forty years, and this is the story of how he did that. His work has rarely been deep - like any columnist, he did get serious now and then, and those tend to be the columns that are best-remembered later - but it's been consistent, and it's been good, and it's been entertaining. Class Clown not only gives us that story, it also includes bits of his old writing from the time throughout, because why should Barry write a new version of something he did right the first time? So there's also a slight "greatest hits" feel to the book as well.

Croquette & Empanada: A Love Story by Ana Oncina

The book doesn't say so, but I'm pretty sure this is a collection of semi-autobiographical stories, by a Spanish cartoonist, about her life with her French boyfriend in some big city in Spain. The American edition is published by Andrews McMeel, the most strongly middle-America publisher of comics-format books, and I wonder if they thought their audience would be less likely to buy a book if they knew it was about "foreigners."

Now I'll actually check to see if any of that was true....

Croquette & Empanada is the first of a series by Ana Oncina, who is indeed Spanish - there were two numbered sequels immediately after this first book in 2014, plus a Christmas-themed book and one about a trip to Japan. None of the other C&E books have been translated into English since this first one was in 2019, but I see two later standalone Oncina books are available here from a romance-themed Tokyopop imprint.

Nothing I can find online says anything any more detailed than that C&E was inspired by Oncina and her boyfriend at the time, so I have no idea if "Croquette" meant he was French, or from another part of Spain, or just that it was his favorite food. And I am assuming that means there was a specific "him" to inspire the character at one point, but not any more than that.

And that tracks. This is a collection of short comics about the two characters - she's an empanada; he's a croquette - starting with their first date but immediately turning into the story of their domestic life together. It's mostly non-specific: Oncina mentions Spain a few times, mostly in the context of a trip to Berlin, but not a particular city. The stories are about their domestic life - living together, small squabbles, getting pets and caring for them, shopping together, and that kind of thing. They love each other, but each have their own foibles - it's a book about youngish people learning to live with another person, who you might love but also does weird things that sometimes surprise you and/or are annoying. It's probably all loosely based on Oncina's real life, but I'll guess "loosely" is pretty loose.

One quirky aspect is that C&E live in a world of mostly normal people - there are a few other anthropomorphic characters, like annoying Garlic at a party and Greek Yogurt in a Berlin hostel, but the vast majority of the background people and secondary characters are drawn as humans with dot eyes, in a similar cartoony style to the main characters.

This is fun, and I can see how it would be popular in Spain, running to five books. It's not actually generic, but it's a lot like many other similar books by other young creators (mostly women, the ones I can think of) and doesn't have as many really distinctive or quirky aspects as some other examples. Well, except for the way Oncina draws her characters - that's unique.

The Joy of Snacking by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

There were three major comics memoirs by women in the fall of 2025, all about the same cluster of topics: eating, cooking, family, and how those things are connected. I don't know if it's going to be surprising to anyone that many women have issues around both eating (their bodies are often policed by others) and cooking (they are generally assumed to be responsible for feeding the people around them), but the cluster is an interesting thing, and I hope someone better-qualified than me (an actual woman, at a minimum) digs in and looks at the three books together.

I first saw Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner, published in November, leaning towards the production side of food and making comic hay about Hayden's inability or unwillingness to do it well. Then I noticed My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung from September, which is more focused on the consumption side of food, and a bout of disordered eating in Tung's youth.

Published in between the two of those is The Joy of Snacking, from Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, whose work I've seen as a cartoonist in The New Yorker, but has also done a previous comics memoir, illustrated several other books, made a few documentary movies, and also works in burlesque.

Snacking is mostly about eating - young Hilary was what we call "a picky eater," and that's continued into her adult life. (She's now in her early thirties.) The spine of this book is, as the title implies, "snacking" - Campbell is one of those people who eats lots of little bits all day long, isn't terribly fond of big meals, and tends to focus on a few preferred, beloved, standard snacks. (She also says this is a youngest-kid thing, which made me realize my younger son is also a grazer - there's a kind of bowl that he uses to gather stuff to eat, and we see them pile up in the sink - so I tentatively think her theory has some merit and she should get a major research grant to investigate it.)

Campbell organizes Snacking into loose chapters, bouncing between two timelines: her childhood and young-adulthood, as she discovered new foods and mostly tried to avoid them, and the last few years and her tumultuous relationship with a man she calls E. Separating scenes or sections are cookbook-like pages, which are each about a food Campbell likes - apples and peanut butter, or "a baggie of goldfish," or "a bowl of potato chips," or Cool Ranch Doritos - with details on how to "prepare" them, when and where to eat them, and their significance to her.

It might be the fact that this isn't her first memoir, but I found Campbell to be harder on herself than other people - in particular, E comes across (maybe, though, because I am a man) as a fairly reasonable guy trying to live with Campbell's issues, as the two of them snipe at each other in that deeply nasty way some couples develop. I'm sure he had his flaws, but I felt that Campbell presented him in a mostly-positive light: he's a guy who is in many ways her opposite (a foodie who works selling wine to restaurants!), but they made it work, more or less, for a number of years.

This is not a how-I-changed book, or a I-fixed-my-problem book. Campbell likes snacking. She's going to continue doing it. On the other hand, this isn't entirely a celebration, since she's also clear that she had a weird, often unpleasant childhood because of her food issues, and that it's affected her adult life in ways she doesn't like. That tension plays out throughout the book - can she be herself, eat the stuff she likes (and maybe "normal" food, too, OK, sure, sometimes), and go through life with less stress and anxiety? Well, maybe. But how about some popcorn and white wine now, while she thinks about it?

This is a big book, with some aspects I've not even mentioned - Campbell traces the eating habits of her parents as well in flashback sections, so it's not just a book about her individually - and a warm open-heartedness I found deeply engaging. Campbell has a cartoony, dense style here: her people are loosely defined with thin lines, her panels are many and jammed together without gutters, her dialogue is long and rambling, like real people. This is a fun book about a distinctive person who's not afraid to show herself being odd and quirky - that's the whole point of the exercise. I don't know if anyone else eats quite like Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell does, but, then again, do any of us really eat like all of the rest of us? This book made me wonder that - and that's a good thing to wonder about.

My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung

Debbie Tung makes personal, almost confessional books of comics - every one I've seen to date is in the rough territory of "here's this thing about me that's quirky, or that caused trouble at first, and then here's how things got better for me." The work is positive, even when the underlying issues - depression in other books, an unspecified eating disorder here - are serious and clearly took a lot of time and effort to get through.

My Perfectly Imperfect Body was her new book last year; her earlier books - at least the ones I've seen; I might have missed something - were (most famously) Quiet Girl in a Noisy World, Book Love, Happily Ever After & Everything in Between, and Everything Is OK.

And I'm leaning into taxonomy and background here, as I often do, when I hit an interesting, good book that is just fundamentally not for me. Tung is a British woman, still (I think) relatively young, and she writes for other young women about topics core to that experience - from the outside, I tend to think of it as the cluster of issues around particularly introverted women living in a world and a society that pushes women to be pretty, decorative, accommodating, and outgoing. Tung's books are very particular, about what happened to her and how she dealt with it, but they're open and welcoming, pitched in a tone that says "if you're like me, you can do the same; you can have a great life, get a little better at this stuff, and still be the person you are."

This is the one about disordered eating, telling the story of Tung's teen years. And I come to it as a person who never had any kind of eating disorder and definitely wasn't ever a teen girl. I have struggled with weight, like so many other people, and lost about a hundred pounds over a six-year period not long ago after twenty years of yo-yo-ing. So my eating issues have been close to the opposite of Tung's.

More centrally, my discomfort here is that I'm a middle-aged man writing about a book entirely about a teen girl's concerns about her body. I want to say that I have no opinion about any teen girl's body, past or present, unless she specifically asks me a very particular question. (Like, maybe, "is this a wasp sting between my shoulder blades?" - I'd be OK answering that.) I want to avoid having any opinions about teen girl's bodies, in general or particular, or to pay attention to those bodies more than nominally, because that would be creepy.

So I came to this book with a mix of wanting to see what Tung would do next - I enjoy her positivity and her conversational comics, with soft tones and realistic gestures - and not wanting to question or focus on the body stuff. And the book is all body stuff.

Tung had the sadly common kind of mother who focused on her body and eating habits, and I think Tung also has habits of thinking that makes her susceptible to spiraling - see Everything Is OK how that turned into depression for her, a few years later - which meant that puberty meant anxiety about her body. Tung here tells the story of those years: she had some kind of eating disorder, though she doesn't here say whether she was ever diagnosed with anything specific or even saw a medical professional to help her get better. She ate less than she should have, and exercised relentlessly, with some notable negative health impacts while not getting to the body she thought she wanted. (Because - and she implies this - that "thought she wanted" was a moving target: it's always that bit slimmer than right now, always a vision and never a reality.)

Like her other books, Perfectly Imperfect is mostly a story of how she got better; how she realized this was a problem and took steps to get out of it. That's a lot of what makes her work so positive: there's an underlying central idea of "I had this problem, and realized it; I may not be perfect but I'm getting better - and you can too!" in most of her books.

If you're more like Tung than I am, you may get more out of it, but even I found it inspiring and (there's that word again!) positive, a welcome flash of can-do in the sometimes dour world of misery memoirs.

Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner by Jennifer Hayden

Hayden was the author, about a decade ago, of an excellent comics memoir with a great, striking title: The Story of My Tits. She's back with another big memoir, on a slightly lighter topic, and this one is even denser and substantially more fun just by virtue of its topic.

Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook is structured like a cookbook, in chapters that include a "recipe" for making the dish that Hayden tried (and often failed) to cook in the preceding pages. Each chapter is a bit of memoir, from various times in Hayden's life, and all are about the preparation of food. As the title implies, Hayden's never been particularly good at cooking - and doesn't seem to have ever wanted to be, though she definitely resents that making meals is her responsibility mostly for she's-the-wife-and-mother reasons. So there's a lot of complicated emotions tangled up in her relationship with cooking - and, as readers of My Tits know [1], Hayden is really good at navigating through her complex emotional states.

I've been poking around her website, and goofing off in other windows, as I try to think about how to talk about how interesting and specific and strong this unique book actually is. I'm a man, and not the main cook in my family, so I don't have an obvious, direct way into this wonderful book about feminism, gender roles, family expectations, and that mix of anger, regret, bitterness, resentment, and just a bit of hope that comes out when Hayden finds herself in the kitchen, yet again, with a hungry family expecting her to feed them.

I can point at the things Hayden does well, even as I suspect I'm more like her husband "Jim" in the book: mildly clueless, wandering in when the work is mostly done, wanting to be helpful but never offering to actually do the difficult stuff. My own wife is the main cook in our family, and I think she falls somewhat farther on the "I want to be good at this" spectrum than Hayden does - but there's still the core cultural expectations: that the wife/mother makes all the meals, is responsible for taking care of the family, is the domestic goddess or the angel at the hearth or whatever depersonalizing term you want to plug in there.

Each chapter here combines both a story from Hayden's life, ranging from her own childhood, through the childhood of her two kids, up to her present empty-nest life. They're not in chronological order: Hayden hasn't structured Smoke in any obvious way, so it comes across as a cluster of stories she's telling us: they're all related, and each one leads naturally into the next one until she tells them all. Along the way, she gets into how her relationship with cooking was influenced by her own mother, and how that has changed over time - but keeps the focus on herself, on what she does in her own kitchen and how it makes her feel.

There's a lot to experience, to unpack, and to make the reader think about how they cook themselves (or don't, and let other people do it for them). Hayden has a wonderfully immediate cartooning style, mostly in four-panel grids, full of lines and color and action in every panel - it could all be too much, except that's the point, that cooking for Hayden is doing a dozen things at once that she never wanted to spend her time on. She wants it to be simpler and easier, but it never is - even in the few cases where everything goes right, it's always complicated.

(I will say one detail reminded me a lot of my own life - Hayden shows how her kids, when young, would get called out when dinner started inevitably burning to open all the windows and doors and flap their coats madly to disperse the smoke. We never did anything quite like that in my house, but whenever steak gets cooked, the smoke detector goes off - and I'm the one who gets to stand under it waving a big book or something until it stops beeping.)

I want to say something like "if you cook or eat, you'll find a lot to love here." I think that's basically true, actually. But if you're a woman, and particularly one who has been responsible for keeping the rest of the people in your house alive, I think it will be even more resonant and strong.

[1] Sorry not sorry, but I love being able to refer to a book that way. And it is appropriate in this case.

Dear Beloved Stranger by Dino Pai

Everyone has one book in them, they say. Usually the "how I got here" story - whatever was unique or special or striking about childhood or life in general. I don't think that's dismissive; I like to think of it as celebratory: everyone can make at least one work of art, if they put in the time and effort and have the drive.

And when I come across a book that is "how I got here," I wonder if this was the one book, or the springboard to a continuing career.

Dino Pai's first major work was the 2013 graphic novel Dear Beloved Stranger. It's somewhat autobiographical: Pai was a new graduate from art school, and his central character here is a new art school graduate named Dino. I never want to assume with semi-autobiographical stories, though: "semi" is a huge territory, and just using your own name doesn't mean any particular moment or thought is taken from life.

Stranger is largely about the desire to create: Dino is out of school, looking for a job without much luck so far, and feeling stuck. So he starts making a story, after running into former classmate Cathy. That story is the story we're reading, more or less, framed by letters to an unnamed "Dear Beloved Stranger." I thought there was going to be some romantic tension with Cathy, or that she was the one Dino was writing to - I'm not sure if that was my misreading, Pai making that a possibility deliberately, or an unfortunate choice in the work.

But Cathy is really just the catalyst here, so making her an attractive classmate, of the gender Dino is attracted to, feels like a distraction - she could have been a male classmate, or a teacher, or some other mentor, and that would have made that role more distinct from the "Dear Beloved Stranger." (Of course, maybe the answer is Pai wanted that ambiguity, or simply that "Cathy" was the real person in Pai's actual life, and that bit is less "semi" and more fully autobiographical.)

The book is in multiple sections, in somewhat different art styles: the story of the young artist Dino, the work he's creating, and how they merge together in the end. Pai moves from mostly greyish tones for the "real" scenes and soft colors for the fantasy sequences, both with an attractively detailed, just-this-side-of-fussy style.

We do learn who the stranger is in the end; I won't spoil that here. It's personal and important for Dino, and probably equally so for the real Pai, but I did wish it had been weaved in earlier in the book, and that Cathy wasn't there as such an obvious red herring. But the story is satisfying; we feel for Dino and think that Pai did well in this first major work.

And if we then search to see what he's done since - which I did - we find that he's mostly been working in animation since then, making stories, but that he seems to have done some comics as well. I'm always happy to see that: I want creators to keep creating, for the people who make "here's how I broke through and actually started making art" stories to keep doing that, in whatever ways they can and want to. So Dear Beloved Stranger was the beginning, but there's more after it: this launched Dino Pai, and he's been going since then.

10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir by Jeff Lemire

For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format - maybe just from an assumption that's how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots of art (and an entire early self-published comic in the back).

10,000 Ink Stains is Jeff Lemire's memoir of what he calls the first twenty-five years of his comics career. I like a lot of what he's done, so I hope that isn't hubris - I'd like to think he has another twenty-five years or more ahead of him.

Lemire has done a lot of work in a lot of directions over those twenty-five years, so it's not surprising that his memoir is well-organized, even compartmentalized. He talks a bit up front, and occasionally later, about how hard it was to talk about his personal life here, particularly some struggles with anxiety and other mental-health issues - but that's a very small part of the book, partially because I don't think Lemire's readership ever noticed any slowing of work or lesser effort because of his problems. (He clearly has a ferocious work ethic - or maybe I mean he loves making stories in comics form, so that's what he spends most of his time on.)

There are nineteen chapters here, each covering one project or a small related cluster of projects, plus an introduction to set the scene and an epilogue to sum it all up. The first chapter is the usual memoir "how I got to zero" section, covering his childhood and education and all of that - up to the point where he decided to start getting serious about comics. The second chapter covers that self-published comic - Lemire put out two issues of Ashtray in the mid-Aughts - and his Xeric-winning first book, Lost Dogs. From there, Lemire has chapters on Essex County and The Nobody, on groups of smaller projects, on Sweet Tooth the comics series and Sweet Tooth the TV series, on his work for DC and then for Marvel, on The Underwater Welder and Trillium and Roughneck, on his adventure comics with other artists (Descender, Gideon Falls, and Plutona), on Black Hammer and Royal City, one chapter on both Frogcatchers and Mazebook, on the recent Essex County TV show, and one last chapter on his two current/upcoming projects, The Static Age and Minor Arcana.

That's a lot of comics, even for twenty-five years. Lemire did a lot of work - a lot of different, detailed, thoughtful, often excellent work. I might make fun of Black Hammer, and suspect I would be similarly dismissive of most of his Marvel and DC work, but Lemire puts in the time and effort to do stories he cares about and do them well, even when some readers (yours truly, for example) might not be as excited by all of them.

There's not a lot of detail about any single project, which might disappoint some readers: if you're a massive Underwater Welder fan, for example, you'll only get about ten pages about it. Lemire generally has liked all of his immediate collaborators and most of his editors - there are some left-unnamed editorial functionaries and fellow writers for DC and Marvel who were less than collegial, but Lemire keeps it vague enough that I think even people more plugged in than me will only have suspicions of who he's talking about - and he mostly likes the work he did, and focuses on the things he learned or did differently on each project.

There's some insights into how he draws each project, including how one early art teacher encouraged him to use the back of a pen nib, the source of some of those chunky, dynamic Lemire lines - but I'm not an artist, so I can only point and say he does talk about that, which may be of interest to people who understand the topic.

All in all, 10,000 Ink Stains is a comprehensive, thorough look at a busy career, by a writer I think was not overly given to this kind of introspection before. If you like Lemire's comics, you'll probably like hearing how he made them.

Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever by Frank Conniff

This isn't really a memoir, though it does have some memories in it. It's not a single thing either, as the title implies: it's twenty-five basically discreet essays, each starting from one bad movie but mostly talking about other things.

Frank Conniff was one of the writers and performers on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show - what I've seen some of the creators call, in a happily joking way, a "basic-cable comedy puppet show" - for about a half-decade in the mid-90s. The show started before he joined it, continued for a few years afterwards, and had a weird reborn life two decades later without him. But he also was part of multiple successor movie-riffing projects - Cinematic Titanic, The Mads Are Back - and was part of the general migration of MST3K staff into the halls of Hollywood to write (and sometimes perform) in other projects over the subsequent decades.

Conniff was also, for most of the years he was on the show, the one who picked the movies - watched them first, made recommendations to the rest of the writing team. So who better to write about a bunch of those movies?

Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever was a 2016 book - so the timing was around the Kickstarter and revival, whether that was deliberate or accidental.

It contains twenty-five essays titled after twenty-five movies that MST3K riffed, including a lot of the big signposts of the era Conniff was part of - Pod People, Manos, Mitchell!, Catalina Caper, Red Zone Cuba, and so on. The essays tend to mention that movie, but are pretty rambly, about movies and pop culture in general, Conniff's life and time on the show, and related topics. That might disappoint some readers, but I found it fun and entertaining - Conniff is a quippy, engaging writer, as you might expect from the fact that he's been writing TV comedy for about thirty years.

So this book will not tell you how Conniff's life changed, and it will not change your life. It also will not give you detailed behind-the-scenes insights into MST3K in the Comedy Central era, or deep cinematic analysis of the admittedly horrible movies it covers. It will wander around and through those movies, touch lightly on some MST3K aspects, and comment on a lot of the media stew that made up the random references on the show. If that sounds appealing, go read it - it's pretty short, too.

All My Bicycles by Powerpaola

There's no right or wrong way to structure a memoir. But some are more distinctive or evocative than others - some make you think "that's interesting, that's different."

Powerpaola - the working name of a peripatetic South American cartoonist whose first name is indeed Paola - decided to tell stories around the bicycles she's had in her life. Where she was at that time, what she was doing, how each specific bicycle helped her get around the places she was living and what people it connected her to. (The edition I read was translated into English by Andrea Rosenberg,)

The book is All My Bicycles, and it doesn't go in chronological order, either. Powerpaola begins with three random bikes - she gives all of them quirky names throughout, or rather tells us the things she called each of them to differentiate them - that she had between 1996 and 2013, in three different cities on two different continents. She also begins the book by telling us she doesn't know how to end it, as if this first section is the last. From there, she moves backwards and forwards, with chapters on other bikes at other times, from her first as a young teen to a bike she used in Buenos Aires just a few years ago.

Her pages are busy, full of images that fill up their panels, all in a dark wash that's more brown than black, with occasional pops of contrasting colors. There's a lot of the natural world, dark and jungly, and even the cityscapes are busy and full of darkness, crammed with manholes and dark expanses of asphalt and barred windows.

There's no single story here: it's not that kind of memoir. Powerpaola sets up a possible overall narrative, about how she always runs away, in that first section, and that is one thread of the narrative throughout. But only one - she's more interested in specifics and moments and memories than in fitting all of her history into some tight schema to make a book out of it. Bicycles is a book of memories and thoughts, all "I remember that time" and "here's what this person meant to me then." It's not "what bicycles mean" - not to her, or to the world in general - but instead "here's my life, as seen through the lens of the bicycles I rode and the places I rode them through."

Precious Rubbish by Kayla E.

Everyone's life is different. Some people have relatively easy lives, some don't. We can forget how wide that spectrum is: there are a lot of people on the "relatively easy" side who don't realize where they actually sit. So seeing something from the far opposite end can be bracing, or frightening, or saddening, or centering, or all of those things at once.

Kayla E. is a cartoonist who had a horrifically bad childhood. She's been turning stories of that childhood into comics under the overall title Precious Rubbish for a few years now, and the book of that name - just published this spring - collects almost two hundred pages of those strips and related material, to tell something like the full story of that childhood.

This is a mosaic rather than a narrative; there's no clear organizing principle of the book Precious Rubbish. We're thrown into the world of young Kayla as, I suppose, she was herself, growing up this way.

I was going to start with a list of young Kayla's troubles, but I worried that could come across as dismissive, or questioning, or mocking. But it is so central, that a catalog - blunt as that may be - is important, so readers understand just how much was going on, how interlocked it all was, how far to the bad side this one childhood was.

Young Kayla had at least four things that could easily be the basis of a "I had a horrible childhood" memoir.

Before any of the actual trauma, she was poor and half-Mexican in Texas, a state not notably generous or full of supports for the poor. Her parents divorced when she was three, in the early 1990s. She had one brother, a few years older. Her father claimed her mother was unfit, and got custody of the brother - but didn't try to get custody of young Kayla. So she lived with that mother, with weekends and other visits to the father. Her father remarried for a few years, and young Kayla's stepmother seems to have been mildly cruel and annoying - though, in retrospect, she's the most normal and reasonable adult in the book.

(Kayla E. doesn't name her other family members at all - they're just "brother," "mother," "father." And she has since entirely separated from all of them, quite reasonably.)

OK. So here's Number One: that mother has some kind of untreated mental illness. Maybe narcissism, maybe something else similar. She's massively selfish, obsessive, mercurial, demanding, flighty, suicidal. Young Kayla was parenting her mother from a very young age. (The mother, and maybe the father as well, was also some variety of reactionary loony Christian, but I've already said she grew up in Texas.)

Number Two: her father seemingly never related to young Kayla as a human being or as his own daughter, but just a female body - comparing her curves to adult women, complaining she was too fat in puberty, putting her on fad diets. Young Kayla was mistaken for his wife on multiple occasions, I think starting when she was shockingly young for that assumption. 

Number Three: her brother molested her regularly, on those visits to the father's house, for years, starting pre-puberty. She seems to have told both her parents, who shrugged and told her that these things happen: either it was just normal or it was her fault.

Coming through all of that, she started to steal drinks, and was a full-blown alcoholic by puberty. That's Number Four.

They're not separate things - the father's disdain and brother's creeping meant visiting their house was even worse than life with her mother, which pushed her deeper into parenting her parent, and into spiraling into alcoholism. They all interlock, all three members of her closest family deeply horrible in different ways.

Precious Rubbish is not the story of how young Kayla got out or got better. There's too much material for that. Kayla E. may get to that story at some point, but this is all still on the level of processing the pain. The strips mostly depict young Kayla: she draws herself as ugly, since they all told her she was ugly.

There are some longer strips here, multi-pagers - usually with two levels of narrative, to mirror the dissociation young Kayla was later diagnosed with - that explain in more depth what happened. But it's mostly moments, either symbolic or realistic, all in a crisp, clean-line mid-century art style reminiscent of Peanuts or Little Lulu or similar sixty-year-old Dell comics. And the reader doesn't quite connect all of those dots for a while. It's clear this was a bad childhood, but it was bad in so many different dimensions simultaneously that it takes Kayla E. a while, in this circling, mosaic fashion, to get to all of them and show what they did to her younger self.

Precious Rubbish has powerful moments, and is full of arresting pages of comics. It is inventive and fearless, taking risks with style and layout, including pages of word games and "text features" reminiscent of those old kids' comics. And it does have a core central truth, that it circles and tells from every side. But it's not quite a single coherent book; it remains a collection of "Precious Rubbish" pieces rather than transforming them into something unified. Perhaps Kayla E. didn't want to do that in the first place: this is a book about brokenness, dissociation, damage. It's only right that a book like that not be a single unbroken thing. It is powerful and steadfast, in all its multifariousness, a shattered image of a childhood no one would wish on any child.

Fortune & Glory: The Musical by Brian Michael Bendis & Bill Walko

Brian Michael Bendis's Hollywood memoir-in-comics Fortune & Glory was republished about two years ago, for no obvious anniversary- or thematically-related reason. At the time, I thought it was just a random new edition, but now it's clear that it was setting up for what we might as well call a sequel.

Fortune & Glory: The Musical was published at the end of January - I don't think it was serialized first, which is a little unusual for a book written by a guy like Bendis and published by an outfit like Dark Horse - and it tells a different story of a younger Bendis getting pulled into writing stuff for other creative media. While the first F&G centered on trying to turn his creator-owned early noir GNs into movies - Spoiler alert! it didn't quite happen, though Bendis got contacts and contracts and some income for a few years and other things eventually did get made - this second one is about one project that we readers might not have known Bendis was ever part of.

The famously...um, troubled Broadway musical of the early Teens, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark [1], had a book attributed to director Julie Taymor, playwright Glenn Berger, and (after a hasty rewrite during previews) playwright and comics scripter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. But it was no secret that other writers, including several comics writers, had been part of the project earlier. And Bendis was one of them, having been pulled in by Marvel head Avi Arad in 2004 to meet with Taymor and, everyone hoped, write the book of this musical.

(The music and lyrics were always going to be by Bono and The Edge of U2, and they were.)

The Musical is written by Bendis and features him as the main character, with roughly the same character design as the Bendis-drawn original F&G. But this time the art is by Bill Walko, with colors by Wes Dzioba and letters by Joshua Reed. It is the story of his involvement with Turn Off the Dark - which is actually pretty short and minor - as well as loosely-related material about his youth and the usual how-I-got-into-comics stuff.

Bluntly, Bendis took a couple of meetings with Taymor (one by phone, one after being flown down to LA), where he was impressed by her energy and passion but reacted really badly to two major pieces of her vision. First, that the musical should end, like a comic book, with a big "To Be Continued!" message - but he thought he could finesse that. Second, and more seriously, that she wanted to change Spider-Man's origin from the standard radioactive spider-bite, so that instead Peter Parker got his powers by praying to the Greek goddess Arachne.

(That stayed in the final work, more or less, so it clearly was a deal-breaker for Taymor. I'm more surprised that Marvel allowed it; they could have fired her instead and gone with another director. But I suppose this was post-bankruptcy, pre-Iron Man Marvel, a company more willing to take a crazy chance on someone who was well-known and successful in her area of expertise.)

So Bendis wrote up a treatment, and had another meeting to pitch it. He did not include the Arachne origin, and got only about that far into the pitch before Taymor blew up, and Bendis's involvement in the project quietly ended. (Bendis thought the project ended, and was surprised when the musical popped back up a few years later.)

That, as I hinted above, is only one small thread in The Musical - maybe 15% of the pages at most. It's not a long story, and not a lot happens. Most of the book is flashbacks to Young Bendis, dewy-eyed and obsessed with comics, bugging people like Walt Simonson and making crappy comics as a teenager and, eventually, forging an indy self-published crime-comics career in his twenties.

I don't know if anyone will come to The Musical for that story, but, if you're a Bendis fan, you'll probably enjoy it. It's the standard story of a lot of fans-turned-pro, and Bendis tells it with a lot of self-awareness and humor. Walko brings a slightly cartoony, caricatured line that adds energy and big facial expressions to pages with lots of captions and dialogue.

The Musical does not provide much background on Turn Off the Dark; Bendis was only involved briefly and inconclusively several years before it actually happened. But it's an amusing "creative people are obsessive weirdoes with quick tempers" story, and the rest of the material in the book is at least loosely and vaguely connected to that story.

[1] I actually saw Turn Off the Dark on Broadway with my two kids. Sadly, I saw it after the retool, when it was just kooky and not full-on insane. I  didn't write about it at the time, and that was fifteen years ago, so all I have are vague memories. It was very technically impressive and full of excellent on-stage talent doing impressive things, but the story was...well, I don't want to say "a confused mess," since that would be insulting, but it wasn't the most clear and understandable thing I've ever seen.

Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks

I don't want to pretend to give advice to someone dead for forty years. That's the temptation with anyone's memoirs: it's so easy to see other people's mistakes, and point them out in clever or cruel ways, to show how they could have had much better, more fulfilling lives, if only they'd known to do...whatever.

Louise Brooks was a star in early Hollywood. She made two dozen movies, mostly from 1925-1931, including a couple considered major classics, but her career faltered around the time of the transition to talkies and she went on to a long life doing other things. She was born in 1906, in Kansas, and had a short career in New York as a dancer and actress on Broadway and with the Denishawn company even before Hollywood; she wasn't even twenty when she first starred in a movie. And she lived to 1985, with her later years in Rochester, New York, mostly because there was a film archive there she became associated with.

Starting in the late 1950s, she wrote a series of essays for various film magazines around the world, seven of which were collected in a 1982 book, Lulu in Hollywood. An expanded edition of Lulu came out in 2000, including an eighth Brooks essay, "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs," and replacing the original introduction by The New Yorker's William Shawn with a 1979 Kenneth Tynan profile of Brooks from the New Yorker, "The Girl in the Black Helmet." Both editions also include Brooks' filmography and an afterword by German film historian Lotte H. Eisner; this one has two extensive sections of black-and-white photos as well. (I imagine the 1982 book had some photos - possibly the same ones, possibly fewer, possibly more.)

Lulu, especially this Expanded Edition, is an assemblage - it was not conceived as a single thing, and it was assembled when, reading between the lines, Brooks was deteriorating and not able to do any editorial work on the individual essays or the collection. So Tynan's introduction tells us things that are in the essays - including extensive direct quotes - and the essays themselves overlap a bit as well.

The reaction to the essays and then the book seems to have been largely astonishment, that a gorgeous girl who ran away from Kansas to be a dancer in her early teens was actually quite intelligent and incisive, a keen observer with a definite point of view and complicated motivations that she somewhat understood and somewhat was willing to explain. It was the old surprise that the beautiful can contribute anything other than their beauty; I suppose the rest of us think they've already been blessed once and getting any more than that is really not fair.

But Brooks was smart, and writes interestingly, if somewhat fragmentarily, about her youth and people she knew (W.C Fields, Humphrey Bogart, Marion Davies' niece) and some movies she made in New York and Hollywood and Berlin.

Again, there are a few major moments in her career - when she was offered initial contracts by two studios and chose the one a mogul advised her against, when she refused to come back and record dialogue for a movie retroactively turned into a talkie, and a couple of others - that an outside observer a century later thinks were not the best choices, and that Brooks might even have known that at the time. But young people will do impulsive things, and Brooks is clear-eyed about how young and impulsive she was - and, even more, about the specific things that led her to make those decisions. We might wish she had done otherwise - it could have led to a longer career, which I think we all would have wanted - but the past is the past. 

Lulu in Hollywood is interesting but not definitive, an assemblage rather than a work created as a single thing, a mosaic (or a collection of small, semi-disconnected mosaics) rather than a portrait. It's got some good insights, and Brooks was a fascinating character, so I do recommend it for anyone interested in the era.

Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson

When you make really big graphic novels, they take a long time. Your career becomes just a few signposts, at wide intervals. And if one of those books misfires, or just doesn't hit the audience you wanted, it can be a long time until the next one.

Craig Thompson has now had three big books, roughly a decade apart: he broke out with Blankets in 2003, followed that up with Habibi in 2011, and now returns with Ginseng Roots, which publishes today. Yes, Goodbye, Chunky Rice was before all of those, and was what first got his name out there and put him in a position to be seen and taken seriously for Blankets. And he had a couple of smaller books in between as well, specific things for particular purposes, but they didn't have the same heft or the same expectations.

It's no secret that Habibi was disappointing. I expect what Thompson found disappointing about it is very different from what readers like me found disappointing, but it clearly didn't work in the ways that everyone hoped it would - it wasn't loved and picked up and praised the way Blankets was.

Of course, that happens a lot in a creative career. The second major work - second novel, second record, etc. - is stereotypically a letdown; that's the base assumption. The breakout is fresh and different, from a new voice, while the second is "what have you done for me lately."

And then we come to number three. Two points define a line, but careers are not straight lines. Three points can define a volume, or at least show how close to each other they are, and what might lie between them.

Ginseng Roots is a step back from Habibi in some ways: Thompson is returning to non-fiction from fiction, centering his own life and experiences rather than telling a made-up story, returning to his family and childhood but telling us different things, and showing his current life and relationships with that family while also doing something like reportage on a global industry. His pages are generally less ornate than Habibi as well, more focused on storytelling, though there are more than a few tours-de-force in the four-hundred-plus pages and twelve chapters here.

In some ways, Ginseng Roots is the story of what Thompson left out of Blankets, and what those elements mean for his life now. Blankets was a focused, personal memoir, about breaking away from a hyper-religious family and finding his own place in the world. But it's now twenty years later, and, like so many people, Thompson didn't break entirely: he still visits his parents, and has what he portrays as a solid, if sometimes limited, relationship with them as they age.

What he left out, most importantly, was a whole sibling: his younger sister, in between the ages of Craig and his brother Phil. There's also the fact that Phil's real name seems to be Jon, which comes up once or twice - though "Phil" is the name used most often here. (I'm not sure if the sister is ever named, which I take to be purposeful.)

And, central to this book, is what they did for a number of summers as kids: hard, physical agricultural work in the local fields. Marathon, Wisconsin is the center of cultivation of American Ginseng - which, weirdly, is more popular in Asian than Asian ginseng, and vice versa - a crop that is tricky and finicky but was hugely profitable in the '80s and '90s when they were young. So they pulled rocks and weeded, weekends at the ends of the school year and full-time in the hot summers, to protect and nourish the fragile ginseng plants.

Ginseng was originally published as a twelve-issue comics series over the past five years, so it won't be a surprise to its core audience. That also means it breaks into equal-sized chapters, each about one moment or aspect of the larger topic - ginseng and how Thompson and his family have been part of it, both then and now, from growing to its use in medicine, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, mostly organized around various research or family trips Thompson made over the course of a few years.

Each chapter is somewhat self-contained, about a specific moment or aspect, but they flow together to tell the larger story. It's a lot like the prose non-fiction equivalent, from someone like Mary Roach, where it's clear each chapter was informed by a particular research trip, but the whole book is a larger, fuller project.

The big themes are physical work, both the joys and pains of it, ginseng itself and its uses and tastes and medicinal purposes (and some vague woo-woo about balancing humors or chakras or whatever; I didn't see any evidence that Thompson investigated any actual scientific evaluations of ginseng as a plant or any of its constituent elements), and how cultures interact and transact and rub up against each other - secular and religious cultures, national cultures, and just kinds of people and mindsets.

Thompson's pages are gorgeous and deep as ever - he tells the story of a lot of troubles with his drawing hand in this book, but it doesn't show in the work at all. (I hope that means the problems are more in the past, but who ever knows?) He's telling something that's not a single story here, so Ginseng doesn't wrap up so much as it hits the end of a set of stories. There could be more; his family is still going and so is the ginseng industry. This is not something that had a single beginning, and it's not the kind of memoir that has a clean single end. But Thompson tells a lot of stories here, about himself and his family, about ginseng in Wisconsin and China and Korea and elsewhere, and about how he personally threads through all of that, how he reacts to it and what he feels about all of it.

Ginseng is oddly both more and less ambitious than Thompson's earlier books. It wants to tell all of the stories it can get to about ginseng: personal, global-trade, farming, medicinal, social. But it also wants to be grounded and specific, not getting into the flights of fancy of Habibi or the raw emotion of Blankets. Maybe I mean that it's clear-eyed about what it can do, and keeps that focus throughout, to show us all of the things within its remit as well as it can.

Five-Finger Discount by Helene Stapinski

Five-Finger Discount is a combined family and personal memoir by a reporter from Jersey City, focusing on the criminal activities of her forebears and extended family tree, as well as how she became a reporter and, more or less, came to write this book at the end of the last century.

Helene Stapinski mostly works in chronological order here, starting with her grandparents and great-grandparents - though anchoring most of her chapters in her personal experiences, starting when she was very young and her grandfather threated to kill her entire immediate family - and eventually getting to her own career in the last fifty pages or so of the book.

She's got a reporter's eye and a reporter's pen, pulling out lots of specific details and focusing on the most interesting/strange/surprising elements of each story, both the ones she lived personally and the ones she pulled out of newspaper morgues and family legends.

I read it because I'm from Jersey myself - though not the same end of it, and definitely not the same kind of family. My people are much WASPier, and from various bits of Upstate New York. We're from older waves of immigrants, mostly English and German - Stapinski had the kind of family with a clear Polish side and Italian side.

Apparently there is a recent documentary based on this book, which I haven't seen and didn't know existed until I started typing here. But it's the kind of thing that could turn into a movie, all sepia-toned mugshots and swirling newspaper headlines and voiceovers from everyone still alive.

Now, Stapinski came from a big family, and I don't think it was all that crooked. One lightly murderous grandpa - who was stopped before he could actually kill any family members, though there are legends about other less-lucky people - a father who regularly brought home things that "fell off the back of a truck," a cousin who ran the numbers for decades, a great-aunt who was politically connected but seems to have been as honest as any Jersey City politician ever was, and so on. It's a parade of interesting stories, but, against the background of dozens of other people who didn't go to Harvard Law and then get disbarred for misusing client funds, or killed by police during a standoff after a robbery, it's probably only a slightly more crooked family than most. Maybe not even that much. Just out in public more, maybe.

So this is an entertaining run through about a hundred years of local scandals - probably not local to you, and not super-local to me, but you know what I mean. Stapinski reasonably connects her family to a lot of other activity - Jersey City was famously corrupt for fifty-plus years of the last century - and tells a bunch of good stories along the way. Her personal life is probably the least compelling bit, but that's what makes it personal, and wraps it all up in the end.

Drafted by Rick Parker

I've grumbled here, a few times, about the ways comics memoirs get pushed to be "bigger." The market - or maybe just editors - want stories to be Important, to be Resonant, to be Striking. And creators, wanting to tell their stories, often bend to that market in one way or another.

But most lives aren't that big. What's interesting about them is the succession of small moments, the choice of paths, what it meant to the person at the time. Keeping that focus, and being both honest and interesting, can be tricky.

Rick Parker walks that tightrope with his memoir Drafted. There's material that lets the publisher (Abrams) be a bit expansive in their marketing copy: Parker was drafted in 1966, during the Vietnam era. As it happened, he never went overseas, but he didn't know that's how it would be at the time. And he's telling this in order, so on every page we only know what Parker knew at the time.

This was a brand-new book in 2024, so it's clearly Parker looking back a long ways. He wrote and drew this in his seventies, telling the story of himself at the ages of eighteen to about twenty-one. (To put it into personal perspective, Parker's entire military service happened up to about six months before I was born, and I am by no means a young man.)

It's a straightforward, crisply-told book. The young Parker was a bit naïve and sheltered - or, at least, older Parker presents his younger self that way - and there are multiple scenes where I wondered if young Parker didn't realize what other people were hinting about at the time, and Parker-the-creator resolutely doesn't explain or add context in retrospect. (In particular, on the day he musters out, there's a long, weird interaction with a fellow soldier and his wife that could have been a backhanded attempt at a threesome or a clumsy badger game - I'm not sure which, but young Parker doesn't seem to see either possibility, and Parker-the-narrator doesn't comment, either.)

Parker runs through those three years in the US Army chronologically, with a brief prologue about his childhood and seven numbered chapters for the major phases of his military career. He goes through basic, gets trained to drive a tank, is approved for Officer Candidate School and passes that, is commissioned as a first lieutenant and assigned to a missile program in the New Mexico desert, and does a few other odd assignments during his enlistment. It's all carefully observed, narrated with a lot of captions mostly in a factual vein, and in a precise, meat-and-potatoes style for both art and writing. Parker isn't trying to be fancy here, despite his long career as a fine artist. This is the clear story of what happened to him, with both the boring and unpleasant parts kept in for maximum transparency.

Drafted isn't quite what I expected, but it does exactly what it sets out to do, does it comprehensively, and tells a story that's both particular and general - Parker was one of more than two million draftees during the Vietnam era, so a lot of elements of his story will be familiar to many of those vets, and of interest to later vets and others.