DiSCONNECT. By Magnus Merklin. Black Panel Press. 160 pp. 2025. $11.99 – $29.99.
This is what a fresh and heart-felt comic looks like. Magnus Merklin achieves a very fluid and spontaneous style that keeps this story of loss and perseverance moving at a steady pace. This is a story about two friends who find a way to rebuild after losing the leader of their band, DiSCONNECT. The two guys find an unfinished song by their departed friend and the two decide to work together to complete it.
Page from DiSCONNECT.
One of the great, perhaps the greatest, traits of a successful work of comics is to make it look smooth and easy and that is precisely what is happening here. Merklin is having fun and so is the reader. The pace is easygoing, in keeping with these cool bohemian characters. You always make time for a smoke and some beer, right? And so the style of the comic, if it’s going to be something authentic and engaging, is going to make time for that smoke and some beer.
Of course, these two guys are still in mourning and working their way out of it. Merklin finds a way for these two musicians to be true to themselves, with emapthy and a mix of the gritty and whimsical.
“You still listen to music, right?”
It can all begin with a little nudge to make something positive out of a tragedy. If these guys are going to find their way back, they’re going to need to put their heads together. One friend dares the other to help him. Once the other friend accepts the challenge, then it’s his turn to keep his friend, who dared him in the first place, to remain upbeat and motivated.
Youth has the resilience to bounce back but it can always use some wise support along the way. Merklin gets that. He taps into the heart and soul of the often tough world of musicians, a world full of promises, one step forward and then one step back, and ultimately delivers a story full of energy, love and hope. Nicely done.
Remember Us to Life. By Joanna Rubin Dranger. 432 pp. Ten Speed Graphic. 2025. $40.
Joanna Rubin Dranger presents a most compelling testament to uncovering truths about family, history and the present in her monumental graphic memoir, Remember Us to Life, the winner of The Nordic Council Literature Prize. As a young Jewish person growing up in Sweden, Dranger had simply assumed the best about the country she called home but an incident as a teenager triggered a lifetime of seeking answers. It was while taking part in a youth Christian workshop, that Dranger approached the priest leading the class. She asked if she could complete the course without going through the confirmation ritual. To that, the priest derisively said: “You Jews, you don’t evangelize, do you?” This struck her as cruel and unusual. Where was all this animosity coming from? Essentially, that is the question driving this book.
“For the building of a Jew-free Europe.”
Dranger’s quest leads her to uncovering the truth of how her Jewish relatives “disappeared” during World War II. Through her research, she comes to find a rich and vibrant family narrative and the devastating violence that led to their senseless murders. Her searching follows her family in Poland and Russia to their subsequent immigration to Sweden and Israel. Dranger also provides historical accounts of the persecution of Jewish people in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia prior to and during World War II, as well as the antisemitic policies and actions of the supposedly neutral government of Sweden. While it may sound harsh to suggest Sweden collaborated with Nazi Germany, history shows that the Swedish government kept meticulous records of its Jewish citizenry and reported that back to Nazi Germany.
The Evian Conference of 1938: zero tolerance on immigration.
History also shows that the U.S. Congress would not budge in allowing in more Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938 since it would interfere with their quotas, already set back in 1924. As Dranger explains, it was made clear during a meeting of thirty-two countries at a conference in Evian, France, in 1938, that even though countries might be sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish refugees, they would not tolerate anymore immigrants.
Dranger’s book is a moving and eye-opening account merging history with personal observation. Following in the tradition of classics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Remember Us to Life is a new landmark work in the ever-evolving comics medium. Dranger’s graphic memoir is not only an investigation into her Jewish family’s history but an essential record.
Paul Karasik began his career in comics as Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s RAW magazine. He has won two Eisner Awards, one for an anthology celebrating forgotten comics visionary, Fletcher Hanks, and for How To Read Nancy, a scholarly book about the language of comics co-written with Mark Newgarden. Paul’s work has appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker. For longtime comics fans, he will always be associated with his collaborating with David Mazzucchelli on the landmark graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s novella, City of Glass, the first book in The New York Trilogy. For the occasion of this conversation, we focus on a very special book, the complete graphic adaptation of Auster’s The New York Trilogy. So, that includes the original plus two brand new adaptations completing the trilogy. For details, you can read my review here.
From City of Glass.
Henry Chamberlain: For someone coming in cold, totally new to the material, please give us a breakdown on the significance of this new book, a graphic adaptation of the entire series by Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy.
Paul Karasik: That’s tricky depending upon where you’re coming from. There’s three novels written by Paul Auster in the early 1980s that have been adapted into comics. They’re called, as a whole, The New York Trilogy, with two set in the ’80s and one set circa 1947. They’re all three New York tales, with three different protagonists, drawn by three different artists. I have adapted, scripted and laid out all three. They start out as straightforward mysteries but quickly veer off and are not just mysteries. As Auster put it, they end up asking more questions than providing answers. That can be frustrating for someone thinking these are straightforward mysteries. They’re not. They’re Post-Modern mysteries but don’t let that put you off. They’re very engaging, emotional, and, I hope, riveting and fun reads.
Paul Auster really gets to enjoy his subversive sensibilities, which the graphic adaptations run with. Looking back at the original tale, City of Glass, there’s a treasure trove of subversion. For instance, the sequence of pages with the wayward word balloon tail. The character is very fragile, can hardly articulate anything, and here’s that word balloon tail jammed down his throat. Can you speak to that series of pages?
I don’t think anyone has really spoken about it before. The second chapter of City of Glass is a monologue featuring this character who has been severely abused. He’s lost cognitive abilities and the ability to be specifically articulate in a linear fashion. In the prose book, it’s an entire chapter. And this was a problem. This is one of the reasons this book was chosen, back decades ago when we did the original adaptation, because this chapter seemed impossible to translate into comics. But I came up with this idea of the nine-panel grid and the idea of the word balloon tail going down into the character’s mouth. And taking the reader down a journey over the next several pages. What was 20-something pages in the book turned out to be a dozen in the comic. You take this expedition down this young man’s tortured soul.
Let’s keep this going. What was it like working with Paul Auster? What was it like being the art director, working with David Mazzucchelli?
Well, working with both of these gentlemen was an utter pleasure. From the moment we got the green light on this book, everything was meant to happen. Working on City of Glass sort of felt like being trapped inside of a Paul Auster story, with a series of bizarre coincidences occurring. I could go on.
Neon Lit edition, 1994.
Oh my goodness, my jaw has dropped. That is what Paul Auster was all about, these unusual coincidences in life. You’ve gotta give us a taste.
Okay, I met Paul Auster when I was teaching at a prep school in Brooklyn Heights. And his son was one of my Fifth Graders in art class. At that point, Paul had only written a few books, including The New York Trilogy. I had heard that he was a young up-and-coming author. But I didn’t really know anything. I read The New York Trilogy. Then I turned to my handy sketchbook and made some notes about how City of Glass could be turned into a comic of some sort.
So, I thought, the next time I see him, I’ll have read the books and would be able to kiss his ass a little bit. Well, we never got around to talking about his books because we had so much to chat about his son. I never really thought about it again. And then flash forward a decade. I get a phone call, just as City of Glass begins with a phone call. It’s Art Spiegelman. He was my mentor, teacher and friend. I had worked with him and his wife, Francoise Mouly, on RAW magazine. He said that he was trying to help this editor in New York who is interested in adapting contemporary noir novels into comics. But they were really stuck on this first novel: it was a challenge to figure out how to tap into the second chapter, a couple of people had already tried. It’s called, City of Glass, are you interested? Well, let me run down to the basement and I find my sketchbook. I’ve already started.
So, this was really meant to be on its own Austerian time warp and schedule. I did the sketches very quickly. I gave the sketches to David Mazzuchelli. And he redrew my sketches and improved them significantly. David, at the time, had already drawn Daredevil for Marvel and created the all-time best Batman, Batman: Year One. He has a way of drawing New York City. He had a way of opening up the space. I had hammered down the nine-panel grid format, which allowed for subtext, and he found a way to add some fresh air to that.
From The Locked Room.
I love it! I’m sure our listeners and readers will enjoy that. I want to jump over to your contribution, The Locked Room. You get to enjoy pushing the limits of storytelling here as in the rest of the series. There’s this one sequence where you get to play with word balloons. One character is flirting with the protagonist, filling the room with word balloons and setting him afloat with all of her verbosity.
She’s getting a little drunk and he can’t get a word in edgewise. At one point, Auster writes something like, “her words held me aloft.” (Looks up notes) Here we are: “I scarcely bothered to listen. I was floating inside that voice.” That little turn of phrase led me to this idea of him being carried aloft by the word balloons.
Paul Auster in City of Glass.
People will ask why a novel should be adapted into a graphic novel. I will get asked this when I’m pitching my own work. And the answer is that a graphic novel is its own animal. You’re investigating the work in a whole different way. It’s not a watered down version but it’s own thing. What do you think?
Auster wrote a prose novel. So, this is a graphic novel. Auster’s concerns deal primarily with what it is to be human as well as quite distinct literary concerns about reading and writing and the nature of fiction and words. In translating these ideas into a graphic novel, you’re still dealing with a novel. So, they’re sharing certain ineffable qualities, including scanning the page from top to bottom and from left to right; turning the page and the effects of turning the page.
Someone asked me the other day if I’d ever be interested in making a film version of these stories. And, yes, if I was given the control and the budget, that would be fun. But it wouldn’t be the same thing at all. It’s not a book we’re dealing with anymore. So, you’d have to reinvent a third, filmic language.
From Ghosts.
Yes, a lot of processing would need to take place. I will move on now to Ghosts, illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti. As we were talking, Mattotti’s version is its own thing. We see here issues of surveillance, of questioning what is being documented, going back to issues of trusting the written word.
Yes, the primary issues that Auster is interested in, and especially reading and writing in this story. You know, this wasn’t a planned trilogy. One thing led to another. There are certain fundamental themes. After two stories, it made sense to pursue a third. Auster once described the three stories as more of a triptych than a trilogy. Each has similar underlying ideas and concepts but each is a distinct story with a distinct plot line so each deserves a distinct graphic solution to the translation.
What did Paul Auster think of the final version?
Before he died last year, he reviewed everything several times. He was very supportive from the outset. The most important thing to know, in terms of working with Paul, was that he gave us complete freedom to do pretty much whatever we wanted to do, with only one rule. The one rule was that every word in the adaptation had to be written by him. Of course, we used fewer words given that we could use pictures. In comics, you don’t need to say it if you can show it. Other than having to be faithful to his text and his story line, we could monkey around with three different sets of graphic ideas. I think he was quite pleased with them.
Coming from your background, everything from RAW magazine to your study of Ernie Bushmiller, can you give us a little more of a window into how you tackled your contribution, The Locked Door?
This is, by far, the longest sustained piece of comics that I’ve ever done and may ever do. It was very challenging for me to do this much work and to have the trust and confidence in my own drawing. It took me a long time with several false starts. But I know this is as good as I could do at this point. So, it does the job.
I know exactly what you mean in terms of finding the right feel for the book. Your version is so smooth and natural. You must have been asking yourself, How can I compete with the original City of Glass? But you have your own thing going.
Exactly. It had to be something that did not look at all like David’s work or Lorenzo’s work. Most of my published work, certainly in the last twenty years, my gag cartoons for The New Yorker or my extended pieces in The New York Times and Washington Post, have been done using a Blackwing pencil, ink wash and Photoshop. So, it wasn’t like I needed to learn a new tool.
Well, I’m blown away by what you accomplished in The Locked Room.
Thank you.
Now, just looking at another page from The Locked Room, here we’ve got the main character sort of stuck on a Möbius strip. Can you tell us something about this page spread?
The implication is that he’s gotten himself trapped in an endless loop. Having agreed to be the steward of his friend’s unpublished work, he’s fooling himself into thinking that he’s actually doing something other than marrying his friend’s wife and building a family. Besides that, he’s stuck in lockstep on this loop.
I think of Paul Auster as a writer who would have been happy in the Modernist era. He reminds me of some writers who loved larger-than-life characters, like Bernard Malamud. Auster has these sort of magical characters, like Fanshawe, very mysterious.
Yeah, you never actually see him.
And there’s that Nathaniel Hawthorne connection that runs deep. For whatever level of reading you’re coming into this, you’ll find something to your liking.
There’s references in here to Cervantes, probably Auster’s favorite writer. There’s a Melville story in there too. A couple of Hawthorne stories. Some are just visually implied.
There are only so many cartoonists who do everything, known as the “auteur cartoonist.” I wanted to get your thoughts on that considering your work on auteur cartoonist Fletcher Hanks.
So, Fletcher Hanks was a cartoonist that I learned about while I was Associate Editor for RAW magazine. The cartoonist Jerry Moriarty walked into the office one day with a stack of weird comic books. Well, between Art Spiegelman and myself, we felt we knew everything there was to know about Golden Age comic books, which honestly is not that much. Most of them are pretty shitty. But these comic books surprised us. We’d never seen them before. Never heard of this artist before, although he used several pseudonyms so he could work simultaneously at various lousy publishing houses. He made 51 comic books during the early years of comics, between 1939 to 1941. Then he disappeared. We printed one of these in RAW. This was before there were any standards. Anything goes. He would torture and mutilate people. Superhero stories but very twisted and grim.
Fast forward several years and somebody sends me a few Fletcher Hanks stories. This is still the early years of the internet. I find a link about World War II pilots and, at the end there’s an email for a Capt. Fletcher Hanks. I assume that Hanks stopped drawing comics because of the war. I decide to contact this person. He says he’s Hanks Jr. and maybe his father is the cartoonist I’m looking for. But he wouldn’t really know because his father walked out when he was 10 years-old after having beat up his mother and stolen the family’s money. This led to my tracking down all of the Fletcher Hanks stories and so that took up ten years of life. The first volume I collected turned out to be so well received that it led to my winning an Eisner Award for it.
So, did this indeed to turn out to be the father of the person you spoke with?
Yes, it turned out to be the father.
Wow.
He was a horrible man, a violent alcoholic. But, once you know that, and you read the Fletcher Hanks comics, there’s a certain resonance that’s created. The stories go from just being twisted and weird to being emotionally powerful.
Something else to mention is that City of Glass is such a wonderful time capsule. It’s set in the 1980s. The whole mission that the main character is on is now outdated. Today, unless he was incredibly obsessive, he could have let some surveillance cameras do the heavy lifting. Any thoughts?
Yeah, it’s set in the ’80s.
Well, you do what you have to do in the era you’re living in. Is there anything else we should cover? Did I miss anything?
I’m just thinking in terms of having designed the book, that I also hope people will enjoy it as an object. Let’s just say there are a number of Easter Eggs for folks to find.
Once I picked this up, I could not put it down. Thank so much, Paul.
Thank you, Henry.
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Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy: The Graphic Adaptation. By Paul Karasik. Lorenzo Mattotti. David Mazzucchelli. 400 pp. New York: Pantheon. 2025. $35.
From City of Glass.
In the case of world-renown writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), one preternatural talent deserves another. That is what happened when his post-modern noir novella, City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and published in 1994. The original prose novel is part of a series, The New York Trilogy: published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986).
Neon Lit edition, 1994.
When the graphic novel of City of Glass came out in 1994, by Avon imprint, Neon Lit, the comics adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli became a word-of-mouth sensation. It was many years in the making with many years leading up to it. A lot of the leading-up-work involved comics artist Art Spiegelman (Maus, 1986) and his attempts to get out in front of the emerging “graphic novel” market. Surely there was a way for serious prose novelists to be involved with serious graphic novels. As series designer for Neon Lit, Spiegelman fought the good fight. Fast forward to 2025, we are collectively more than ready for “serious graphic novels,” and now we have a new book that includes the original City of Glass comics adaptation and completes the trilogy with new adaptations of the other two books. That is quite an undertaking to say the least and the results are impressive.
Excerpt from City of Glass.
Any really great comics adaptation will not attempt to directly compete with the source material but bring in something new, something that only the comics medium can offer. What’s fascinating in this case is that Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind this work, not only found a distinctive comics path from the Auster source material back when he was art director and David Mazzucchelli was the comics artist. But then, decades later, Karasik would have to strike a chord, but not be overwhelmed by his previous accomplishment, the comics adaptation of City of Glass, such an iconic landmark work. Is that even possible? Yes, absolutely. Paul Karasik did it again as art director to Lorenzo Mattotti’s comics artist; and, ultimately, when in charge of his own adaptation of the final story.
From City of Glass.
You can enjoy a comics adaptation on its own. However, keep in mind, that if you read the original work, you get that much more out of the experience. At least, you should know a few things. We’re dealing here with a funhouse of ideas about storytelling: narrators and unreliable narrators; the role of a story; the very nature of words. These comics are adapting the work of Paul Auster, a masterful writer with a keen talent and temperament for Magical Realism and Post-Modern experimentation. Let’s first take a look back at the City of Glass comics adaptation and how it tapped into this peculiar and surreal terrain.
Post-Modern Paul Auster: The author inside his own novel.
City of Glass, the comics version, jumps right out of the gate. There are so many ideas bubbling around and perhaps the most compelling is the existential quandary of having to be inside one’s head, needing and desiring to be there, while also wishing to run as far away from one’s self as possible. And how does one fully express this most bizarre, contradictory and human condition? Visual metaphors will get us part of the way but then it’s up to the comics artist to take it further which certainly happens in all three of these stories. Just keep in mind that all of this is an exercise in subverting the classic detective story. These are mysteries that go well beyond mysteries, asking more questions than ever providing answers.
Page from City of Glass.
There’s a scene in City of Glass that you can argue is quintessential to the story’s concerns: it is in the second chapter and is condensed into a set of pages in the comics version that evoke the struggle to tell any story, to form any thought. The character is a young man who has been abused and can barely articulate anything. The tails to the word balloons he emits are jabbed down his throat, powerfully evoking his struggles. Those same word balloon tails navigate their way through human history and humanity’s collective struggle to communicate.
From Ghosts.
That same energy, with a distinctive twist, can be found in the next story, Ghosts. Lorenzo Mattotti leans towards his strengths as an illustrator and painter of full-throated dramatic images. So, the rhythm tends to be one of powerful image balanced with powerful prose, back and forth, at an intoxicating pace. So, yeah, it works. I mean, where does one go after David Mazzucchelli? Karasik goes with Mattotti to tap into all the dark urban angst in a thoroughly different way.
From The Locked Room.
And, finally, we come to the last story, The Locked Room. Paul Karasik has placed himself in the very best company and he delivers. Known for his light pencil work (The New Yorker, The New York Times), Karasik’s more subdued approach can still cut to the quick in depicting any given character’s foibles. One particularly poignant moment has the main character feeling rather smothered by his flirtatious hostess and finds himself surrounded by all the word balloons she creates from her excessive chatter. It’s enough for him to nearly float away on all the hot air packed away.
Post-Modern Diner: as gritty as a Modern Diner.
The New York Trilogy is many things, none the least of which is a highly stimulating look at who we are and/or who we claim to be. This new comics adaptation of all three stories is definitely the big treat of the year for anyone who loves great fiction and great comics. Comics scholar Bill Kartalopoulos once said at a symposium many years ago: “City of Glass more than most of the graphic novels that have been published over the last dozen years or so is a book that makes all the right choices.” Well, that can certainly be said of this remarkable collection.
And it came to be known, far and wide, as Signalgate! Look, ma, I’m usin’ me noggin. Enjoy my latest comic. What do you think of Signalgate?
On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were evasive during a Senate hearing that focused on their roles in the Trump administration’s scandal involving sensitive military information that was inadvertently shared with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
Democrats were most apoplectic over Gabbard’s and Ratcliffe’s insistence that no classified information had been shared in the group chat on the Signal app, which Goldberg said had involved “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing” and had included Gabbard and Ratcliffe, along with Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz.
While Republicans largely avoided the disturbing report in their questioning, Democrats leaped at what was the first opportunity to question Trump officials at length about the scandal. And it was clarifying because it showed Trump officials’ eagerness to evade questions in the face of accountability.
And, if you’re interested in working with me on any form of illustration or related stuff, just drop me a line in the Contact form. You can find some more of my work here.
Josh Pettinger’s latest comic and his rising profile among graphic novelists should tell us something. Born on the (British) Isle of Wight, living in Philadelphia, he is widely regarded as being in a sort of humor family that prominently includes Simon Hanselman and Daniel Clowes. Publishing Goiter, the story of a traveling ventriloquist’s adventures, Pettinger established himself as a wacky type. “Anything can happen and usually does,” the tagline of an otherwise forgotten television show in an era that Pettinger and others might have found more comfortably mundane. Absurdism works best among the normals.
In Tedward, the protagonist as well as the title of the book, the credulous loser finds himself in the most improbable situations, with the least probable advisors and girlfriends. He stumbles through his adventures, ever credulous. This is comic art slapstick, with social anxiety at the center.
Looks count heavily here. The book starts with a romantic breakup that he believes may be due to his slightly overgrown, blonde flat-top, and proceeds to a memory of a lost love, regretting, “I never really appreciated her hair cut.” (p.5) He’s not a deep thinker.
On the verge of suicide, he is wooed to sanity by a most unusual business agent (with a black curl dangling into otherwise white hair) and soon meets an assistant, a woman with a curiously floral hat. Leading Tedward into the warehouse district of an unknown city, she guides him into a den of wild sexual excess, marked by pudgy, out-of-fitness naked bodies. It’s not anyone’s ideal of the standard orgy. But it is the most dramatic moment (and pages) of the comic, if only we could understand their larger meaning.
Tedward at rest.
There are two or three things to note, as we ruminate the history of comic art styles.
The first is how oversized, often overweight, characters can be found all across the funny pages and comic books. They almost never escaped being stereotyped. That is, no one would confuse them with heroes, heroines or even central figures. Very often, they were played for laughs. Pretty much as were nonwhite characters.
Thoughtful readers of comics will come up with ample exceptions, perhaps starting with Walt Wallet of “Gasoline Alley.” Pudgy or more properly shapeless, but also kindly, the world’s greatest step-father, also an affable businessman until his auto shop somehow disappeared, etc. The strip, which more than any other introduced funny pages readers to daily comic-narrative continuity, also included an embarrassingly stereotyped, oversized African American family cook, Aunt Jemima style. Today’s readers, like comics historians, can only wince and move on.
Chris Ware, more than anyone else, may have introduced a new but related type of characters. His piquant protagonists, male and female alike, seem to be both heavy-set or at least shapeless, and lonely. Even Ware’s imagined father-type, the Superman famously seen apparently laying dead in the street, has anything but a Superhero physique.
Page from Tedward.
Daniel Clowes added wild science fiction to the cause of loneliness, with characters roughly opposite to the physique-ideal comic book science fiction characters, especially the impossibly-beautiful/sexy spacewomen of the 1940s. Closer to real life, the Moderns are famously lonely, cannot escape being lonely. We never really learn why but we cannot help suspecting that in a world of omnipresent fitness opportunities and Ozempic commercials warning of the diseases of being overweight, purported or otherwise, they don’t feel good about themselves. The jolly fat man of yesterday’s comic strips, the “buddy” character who wants to help but somehow always appears foolish—these seem to be succeeded by Tedward, the protagonist himself.
Out-of-shapeness and loneliness; but we also need a third element: grotesque, uncensored sex. Tedward features some pages of sex that owe heavily to the Underground Comix and before them, the so called “Tijuana Bibles” available only under the counter or from the back of delivery trucks. Here, however, sex becomes a bizarre plot line: Tedward’s job is to spray the naked, post-coital men and women “clean,” preparing them for more sex. He never joins in, and at the end of this defining adventure, he is face-to-face with his former girlfriend, an avid participant. What could be more demoralizing?
The remainder of the comic floats along, from one improbable adventure to another girlfriend, overweight and, like him, notably hairless below the waist. He blunders into losing her, even calls the cops to arrest her for the high crime of somehow stealing a rented television. Toward the end of the book, an equally plump Asian fellow in shorts makes him an intimate friend and then, naked in a sauna, tries to force Tedward to undress. And so it goes onward toward a bang up conclusion of an apparent murder victim, rebirth in outer space, and return to a hospital bed on earth. At the end, imprisoned for murder, Tedward becomes a sort of Charles Atlas of superhuman physique, happy and thus at last a hero of his own life, without romantic prospects unless roommate, naked on the toilet, might count. Like the rest of the book, the conclusion is painfully funny.
All this undoubtedly tells us something, but what is it? Clowes’s Monica, which received grand billing in the New York Times book section, has a more ordered, historically-situated narrative, albeit with a Sci Fi ending that takes us to imaginary worlds almost as wild as Pettinger’s version. Tedward, like its lead character, is unbounded by anything, historical context, time or space. Whatever his final girlfriend (she, of a large black spot amidst her otherwise perfectly pink hair) seems wise as she tells him to realize his destiny, or at least feel better about himself, by searching “from within” (p.136). This is the best advice he is ever likely to receive. But what can he do with it?
UFO: Undercover!Yerstory Transmedia. (w) Eric Warwaruk. (a) Diego Lugli. 2023. 268pp. $24.99
When ordinary lives intersect with the supernatural you can end up with a very satisfying story. A really good space alien story needs a creator who embraces the tropes. Writer/creator Eric Warwaruk knows how to lean into the ordinary and the uncanny to achieve great results.
It’s the journey that is most important in these kinds of stories. The reader invests time in getting to know the characters, usually down on their luck with little prospects. And then, one day, something other-worldly happens. Suddenly, ordinary lives are seen in a new light. Suddenly, 25-year-old Tyler’s UFO podcast becomes very relevant. Not even his best friend Scott can scoff at him now.
If you are looking for a very relatable story with everyday folks confronting a certain X-factor like Stranger Things, then this slow-burn thriller will satisfy you.
The artwork by Diego Lugli is a perfect fit for this story about a daydreamer who dares to keep dreaming. There’s a very fine mix of the whimsical with the surreal. In this comic, in the spirit of such mighty daydreamers as David Lynch, the ordinary is quite extraordinary. There’s a very placid energy running through these characters, spooky in a good way. I love the fact that our hero is so reluctant. The publisher behind this project, Yerstory Transmedia, works with various media and I could see a movie version of this comic book. Sure, why not? That said, I’m charmed by the fun and weird vibes of this authentic work just as it is.
“Why me?”
I encourage you to seek out this very charming and quirky Sci-Fi thriller. And be sure to keep up with Eric Warwaruk and the rest of his comics titles at Yerstory.
Sounds like something out of Green Eggs and Ham, doesn’t it? I just thought up those lines as I’ve been looking over Theodor “Dr. Suess” Geisel’s career as a political cartoonist (1941 to 1943).
We have come to accept that the Orange One revels in this hiding in plain sight, with his MAGA hats and his embracing fascism (look up America First) and it seems like we’ve normalized it. Well, no, I don’t really think so. You see, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We will not get overwhelmed. We can process what is going on and we can protest–and vote. U.S. House and Senate midterm elections are November 3, 2026.
It’s happened before and history has a way of repeating itself. How to confront our current state of affairs? When just using words fail, there are alternatives, like political cartoons. What’s so powerful about political cartoons is that the very best of them continue to speak truth to power, well into the future and hold their relevance.
The “America First” isolationist slogan of yesteryear (U.S. reluctance to enter WW I) devolved into a loaded and not so subtle dog whistle for nationalists and fascists in the United States (U.S. insistence in not entering WW II). Donald Trump embraces it and uses it to represent U.S. foreign policy (U.S. avoidance of becoming involved with Ukraine, disparaging NATO and readily appeasing Russia).
Any American, no matter who you voted for in the last election, who appreciates we’ve entered into a crisis, can stay tuned, stay informed and voice your concern. You can protest, of course. You can contact your representative. You can vote. Here are some resources: You can streamline contacting your representatives with @5calls and Common Cause. You can also join the upcoming national protest at the Washington Mall on March 14, 2025. Go to nowmarch.org. At the end of the day, I believe that Americans just want an honest and straightforward government.
America First? No, it’s just that those of us that believe we’ve already entered into a Constitutional Crisis, to say the least, want America to return to the good work of aspiring to be at its genuine best (no doubt, it’s a journey): to lead, to care and work for the American people. No more secret hand gestures and signals. No more kleptocracy. Did any honest American voters vote for a kleptocracy? Didn’t think so.
Milky Zest. Steve Hogan. Acid Keg Comics. One-Shot. 2024. 28pp. $5.99
I would never tell Steve Hogan to stop making comics even though this comic book is begging me to do so. Ah, I only kid. I kid in the stubbornly ironic way that Hogan loves. If you followed alt-comics in the ’90s, you know precisely what brand of humor I’m talking about. It permeated the very air. All of hipsterdom worshiped the crass sarcasm tempered by a devastating self-deprecation. That was Gen X sensibility for you. In our youth, we valued spot-on humor and were not overly timid and cautious in its pursuit. It was a certain vibe we were playing with in music, fashion and comics: Peter Bagge’s Hate; Daniel Clowes’s Eightball; Rick Altergott’s Doofus, and so on.
Steve Hogan provides a sharp wit that harkens back to the snarky humor of ’90s alt-comics and makes it his own. At a deeper level, Hogan also honors the respect for craft with spot-on design sense. The antecedents date back even further to mid-century modern, dealing in crisp clean lines and a wry and dry sense of humor, often dealing with wacky and larger-than-life subjects. To engage in this kind of comics as a cartoonist today is certainly tricky. You don’t want to just repeat something that essentially already was a sly post-modern look back. That said, this retro style of comics is totally valid and various contemporary cartoonists work in it to one degree or another: Sammy Harkham and Rich Tomasso are a couple of excellent examples. As you can see from the page excerpt above, and the panel excerpt below, Hogan revels in visual treats and packs in as many added gags as possible.
The story for this comic is a fun MacGuffin-packed roller coaster of a tale. If you like a good comedy thriller with the very fabric of reality at stake, then this is for you. And, along with all the irony, there’s even a sweet romantic subplot. It turns out that our hero, Milky Zest, is a good guy with Tuesday, a good woman, by his side. It’s up to Milky to prove his worth as the newbie at a private detective agency. Little did he know that he would end up in the thick of a case with earth-shattering repercussions. Yeah, that sounds about right. All in all, I enjoyed this comic and, without a hint of irony, I look forward to what Steve Hogan does next.
