Books: comics memoirs (and adjacent)

[roadrunnertwice]

I finally have some more books reviewed! So here's a small batch.

Yuko Ota — Offhand (comics and artbook)

May 11

I saw parts of this injury and re-injury saga in real-time via Hirsh and Ota's Johnny Wander posts, but I think this is the first time she's laid out the whole ordeal.

Anyway, this book is a liminal critter. It's mostly just an artbook, but there's the edges of a memoir poking out at the sides, and you also get the sense that the book-as-physical-object might be part of some complicated personal catharsis that the reader is only incidental to.

I enjoyed it and I like having a copy, but I don't know that I'd recommend going out of your way to find it unless you're already an avid follower of Ota's work, in which case you probably backed the Kickstarter anyway and got your book the same time I did.

Or unless you're a work-through-the-pain type in need of a scared-straight cautionary tale! Bc damn. (Artists and craftspeople and deskjobbers, please take care of yourselves and watch out for your fellows.)

Tillie Walden — Spinning (comics)

May 18

This is a comics memoir about the author's teen and pre-teen years as a competitive figure skater.

So... what'cha all think about people writing memoirs (distinct from other, less perspective-intensive forms of autobio comics) at like age 22? I'm ambivalent about it, and I think this book might suffer some for the want of a little more distance and perspective. Spinning does an impressive job at wrapping you up in how it felt to be a depressed kid who does all this stuff, but it has nothing at all to say about being a person who used to do all this stuff, because Walden is still just barely starting life as an ex-skater? And like, her teenage fixation on her old coach, Barbara, seems like the sort of thing that would leave marks on every exposed surface on your life, in the kind of way that might take until you're into your 30s to start picking apart fruitfully, right?

Well, anyway, it's a book with some flaws. It is still a fairly amazing book, though. The cartooning is gorgeous, and so stunningly fluent at bottling intense (sometimes smothering) emotional spaces into a panel. And the choice of that goldenrod as a rare spot color was inspired. And admit it: you, too, are curious about what the hell the life of a teen competitive figure skater was like.

Ellen Forney — Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me (comics)

May 19

A comics memoir about how Bipolar I fucking sucks!

I remember briefly opening this before and deciding I wasn't in the mood for it, because it starts during one of Forney's manic periods and that part was full of cracked-out Betty Boop eyes that I just couldn't fucking handle at the time! The art style and cartooning style of this book are all over the place, because she's using stylistic variance to deal with some wild experiential variance. Not just manic vs. depressive, but also serious vs. comedic, and subjective/emotional vs. clinical/informational/analytical.

Anyway, this was a good book. Honest and tough and funny and interesting. And I really appreciated that bit in the next-to-last chapter where she kind of paused the whole subjective merry-go-round and faced head-on into one of her core anxious questions about her disorder (the possible link between mental illness and creativity) in a really measured and straightforward way. IDK, I feel like that was a mode of denouement I've almost never seen.

I knew about Forney from her "I was 7 in '75" comics (which I remember being hilarious and bizarre), and from some incidental work she did for The Stranger back in the day. This isn't much like those (of course??), but it was funny how familiar the voice was.