Raised by Ghosts by Briana Loewinsohn comics review

Raised by Ghosts. Briana Loewinsohn. Seatte: Fantagraphics, 2025. 224pp. $18.99

Guest review by Paul Buhle

The genre of difficult childhoods, difficult women’s childhoods in particular, has quickly become global over the last twenty years or so, and in doing so, has lifted up the comic art genre in both narrative and sales.

Some of these stories are in troubled, dangerous places. Persepolis by Marjane Sartrapi is a world-wide sensation. But calmer, presumably more middle class milieux without danger or civil war close at hand, also present  serious challenges, moreso in recent decades even in the prosperous West. Childhood can be a very lonely time. On the plus side, the lonely or nearly lonely child has the time and space and necessity to navigate a creative response to life’s challenges. More than one lonely child has grown up to be an artist or writer or musician or something else with a similar intensity.

Thus we have Briana Loewinsohn, a relatively recent voice from a Berkeley, California that is no longer the hippie/radical dream-space of the 1960s. Her stories are about Berkeley (she lives next-door Oakland today, with her family, as do so many ex-Berkeleyites pushed out by housing prices). And it is notable, in this city that once, more than a century ago, had a Christian Socialist mayor, she finished second in a public library art competition, in 1993. Her first published graphic novel, Ephemera (2023), is a life story of sorts. This one digs deeper in various ways.

This is a kid who felt alone: she didn’t like school very much, had a boozer for a mother and a pothead for a father. Teachers obviously try to break through but do not really succeed. She urgently wants friends but has trouble with her own defenses, expecting the worst at all moments. A very special twenty-page, brown-paper section is entirely abstract but comes to a sharp conclusion: she wants urgently to reach a father, on his own account who did not expect to live to age 25. Dad is present-but-absent and then absent altogether. He is, it seems, the most palpable ghost, if a ghost can be palpable.

On the plus side, father and mother alike are deeply into underground comix whose genius and production suffused the Bay Area scene in the 1970s, with memories extending a generation or so beyond. Not to mention the artists themselves, many of whom stayed around to become a sort of permanent presence.

Some were self-destructive, awaiting an untimely end. A handful of others interacted with the community. Spain Rodriguez taught generations of kids how to draw, create murals or posters, how to think of themselves socially as artists of a non-museum kind. Trina Robbins offered herself as a model of the militant woman artist. Most of all, of course, they had all, in their published work, left behind, willy-nilly, a treasury of comic art. Even the instantly obscure tabloid Yellow Dog fell into her hands, and we can imagine her drinking in the creativity, the rebelliousness and above all the diversity of the art. If they could do it, why not her?

Somehow she also had access to George McManus’s famed “Maggie and Jiggs,” perhaps because reprints became more common by the 1980s. Along with Archie comics that her mother provided (“good comics”), these mainstream examples taught storytelling.

The Freak Brothers—known throughout Europe by the 1970s— must have seemed a little like her own parents. But Lynda Barry surely hit the spot, The unhappy kid who seeks a Bestie, always fearing the relationship may not last. By 2010, Barry, who had to be persuaded to publish at all, had become a MacArthur “Genius” fellow: now there’s a role model. Oddly, her grandfather was friends with the very bohemian, dark comedy genius of the New Yorker, Charles Addams, out on the East Coast.

Loewinsohn began drawing in a more organized fashion during her high school years, with a (male) school pal. By the time she got to college, she had begun creating mini-comics, trying out various styles.

She became a high school art teacher almost by instinct, not so many years after she began volunteering in classrooms when still in school. She insists that she loved teaching, quite a claim for any high school teacher. She kept at it for almost twenty years, while her own children grew up.

Her mother’s death, or rather, her memory of her own feelings looking back at her mother’s death, inspired Ephemera.  It met with a warm response. Readers, enough readers, obviously understood what she was attempting to do. She had the encouragement to go on.

Her protagonist in Raised By Ghosts may have more trouble in school than the real life artist,  but she effectively captures the sense of frustration, the inability to break through that she must have found in her own students and at times in herself. This frustration is directed inward. It does not lead to violence, self-harm or even the bitter emotional conflicts that can cause physical fights and long-term emotional damage. Instead, and here we are again tempted to project the artist into the story, she sees the kid steeped in music that she listens to; or a fictional but pervasive Charlie Brown (newspaper and television series);  and to an uneasiness with herself that she must, with effort and patience, somehow work out.

The story, translated back into real life, appears to have a happy ending even within an increasingly troubled and unhappy world. This itself is an accomplishment.

Paul Buhle