![]() (Though to be fair, it’s just oral herpes. He’s brutally (and graphically) honest about the affliction without working the gross-out factor too much. Dahl’s penwork is lyrical, at once detailed and light, never weighing down the humor-no easy feat. Monsters is possibly the funniest, most heartbreakingly honest herpes memoir ever committed to print. A must-have for any fans of James Kochalka or John Porcellino. Under cartoonist Gabby Schulz’ master hand, Gordon Small absorbs with wide-eyed wonder the ambient details that ultimately encourage us all to cling to this wonderful world by the tiny finger holds afforded to us!Īs you can tell, I’m deeply moved by Weather’s joyful perspectives and optimism. However fleeting, Gordon Small embraces life with all of its turbulence and small pleasures. ![]() ![]() This is a Gordon Small comic and that means a laughing good time with a money-back guarantee! As the title suggests, Weather is a breezy, summery short tale about the effervescence of life itself. If you can accurately see your surroundings already and want to live as closely examined of a life as possible, there are few books better than this to help in that task. If you’re content in the bubble that you’ve made of your life and have no interest in seeing if anything could break through, stay away from this book at all costs. Granted, his mind was in a sick and dark place when he thought all this through, but I defy anybody to read this without agreeing with a good chunk of what he said. He came away with a damned near irrefutable case against humanity in all its forms, unless you were willing to stick to that plan of willful ignorance, but you can read this yourself to see the case that he made. While those books offer stories of people who navigated through their physical and mental problems to the point of reaching new possibilities for their lives, in Sick, Schulz’s illness is the avenue that leads him to simply confirm all of his worst fears about himself and the world surrounding him: “The sickness had become me.” This is uncompromising work by a brave and powerful artist. Sick joins other books in the growing genre of graphic memoirs dealing with health issues, among them Ellen Forney’s Marbles, John Porcellino’s The Hospital Suite, and Jennifer Haydn’s The Story of My Tits. Schulz captures the experience of sickness with uncomfortable accuracy: the woozy slipping in and out of consciousness, the sense of health and wellness becoming but a distant memory–and of pain and illness defining all of one’s existence. Gabby Schulz’s unfairly overlooked and singularly upsetting Sick (Secret Acres) deserves mention, a painful and highly intimate look at depression from the inside out. He is probably the most inventive cartoonist working in comics that many readers still have never heard of, and this is his most masterful piece of cartooning to date. You may have seen Sick online when it was first serialized a couple of years ago, but in this new edition, Schulz seems to have repainted the artwork to give it a more rich and visceral feel. Schulz uses the book to explore topics as broad as class inequity in the United States and as specific and personal as his own psyche. – Foreword Reviews, Best Graphic Novels of Fall 2016 But those looking for a vital, independent voice to follow in the footsteps of Robert Crumb and others should give it a try-some of Schulz’s images and ideas will linger, like a stubborn infection, long after the book’s cover has been closed. ![]() With plenty of anatomical details and ailments shown and described, Sick isn’t for the easily grossed-out or offended. Schulz’s art is as good as any independent cartoonist working today-grim and graphic, but also frank and penetrating. He has spent the last couple of years burrowing further into the American Midwest, in preparation for settling into an obscure yet blandly respectable death. In May of 2007 he completed a one-year Fellowship at the Center for Cartoon Studies, which turned him into a full-time cartoonist and thus literally ruined his life. Born in Honolulu, Gabby has spent most of his adult life in a dreary transit about the continental United States. Ken Dahl is the name Gabby Schulz used to make it harder for his relatives to connect him to the comics he draws. ![]()
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