my friend Joe handed me this book and said “this is one of the best comic books i have read ever”. i was very surprised, joe is a total comic book geek (decades old i’d say). so i took a good read at this. and guess what? it’s beautiful. it made me cry. it’s delicately narrated. i little distant, but it’s a “sensible distance”. or sensitive. it’s full of those “comic book moments”, i mean, do you ever see something and think “that could have never been done in a movie, or in a book, or in a song…” i mean, there are things that fit perfectly into their format. it’s not like, say, a movie is a better format than a short story. it’s more that they have their particularities and there are effects that each one of those formats is capable of and the other is not. and with a disputed genre/art form like comic books i’m always tempted to find those “moments” and say: see, see: comics are unique, they have a way of their own, they can do things unachievable by other means. so this one book does it all the time. beautiful instant one page cross referenced palimpsestual story telling/literary criticism.

and its dark. oh so dark. read this and then pass it with blankets by craigh thompson for a glimpse of the subtleties of american lives.