Books I Read: 100 Demons

I’ve read Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! before, but I wanted to read it again because I find it so inspiring. My first encounters with Barry’s work were with Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and I’ve been a fan ever since. I love One! Hundred! Demons! for a variety of reasons: the work is beautiful, the stories are moving, the message is about persevering regardless of what anyone else’s thinks or what happens to you. My favorite strips in this series are the ones focusing on her childhood, how maligned she was yet kept insisting that she might one day have something to say. I read this slowly so I could savor how precious these artworks are.

Books I Read

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Books I Read in February: Favorite and Least Favorite

This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In February, I read seven books. (You can find those books and my short reviews here.) My favorite book was Mimi Pond’s Over Easy, a fascinating look at a San Francisco Bay Area diner scene of days past. My least favorite was Manu Larcenet’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was a disservice to the source material and narratively disjointed.

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Books I Read: My Most Secret Desire

I’ve read Julie Doucet’s work before and liked it, but My Most Secret Desire didn’t quite work for me. It is very strange, and I like strange, but this book is primarily a series of renderings of freaky dreams. Dreams in which she has a penis or is pregnant with something weird or odd people do frightening things. Is this the female unconscious or just chaos? I felt it leaned heavily into grotesque without any accompanying insight.

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Books I Read: The Saga of the Swamp Thing 1

I don’t usually read superhero comics, but I picked up The Saga of the Swamp Thing 2 and then realized I needed to read The Saga of the Swamp Thing 1 first. I chose this series because I was dazzled by the art and also because I’m aware that Alan Moore is considered a comic book god. I liked parts of Book 1—I mean, it’s weird as fuck—but the story feels fragmented, and I think I had a hard time having an emotional connection with a plant, aka The Swamp Thing, which, by his (its?) own admission, is what he is. Anyway, I can never follow these action driven plots with so many characters. A mixed bag experience for me, I guess.

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The Last Showgirl

Really enjoyed The Last Showgirl. Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis are wonderful. Sweet, atmospheric.

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An Appreciation of Pee-wee's Playhouse

I wrote an appreciation of Pee-wee’s Playhouse and the late, great Paul Reubens for HILOBROW. Read it here.

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Books I Read: A Child's Life and Other Stories

I can’t remember the first time I read A Child’s Life and Other Stories, but it would have been over 20 years ago. The book seared itself into my brain. The art spellbound me, the stories were set in the Bay Area where I had grown up, and the rage and pain of a young person who was neglected at home and acting out sexually and through drugs and alcohol was deeply familiar to me. I could say this book changed my life, but that sounds overdramatic and like a cliche. I will say that when I sat down to reread the book, I wondered if it would have the same effect on me all these years later. And it did. It makes me want to be braver and more reckless and more honest in my own work. And that’s invaluable. Thank you, Phoebe Gloeckner.

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Books I Read: Pretending Is Lying

What a curious ride Pretending Is Lying by Dominique Goblet is. A hazy graphic memoir. A disturbing accounting of childhood trauma and its consequences. A visual depiction of navigating life, relationships, and love that reels through time and place to land defiantly nowhere. I really liked it. Not for the unimaginative.

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Books I Read: Over Easy

Wow wow wow. Over Easy is so great! This book was such a delight, and I read it slower and slower as I neared completion because I didn’t want it to end. I’m a bit younger than author Mimi Pond, but I grew up in the East Bay so the people types and general places and all over vibe was very familiar to me. I appreciate that she focused on this important place and special time and fantastic cast of characters rather than feeling like she had to deliver up some sort of action-oriented plot. I loved this book. I’m sure I’ll read it again in the future.

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Books I Read: After land

After Land is an extremely strange book by Chris Taylor. I loved it for the images. It’s haunting and weird and striking. The story is elusive and slippery. If you’re looking for something that’s different, this book is that.

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Books I Read: The Road - A Graphic Novel Adaptation

I was really looking forward to reading this graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road by Manu Larcenet, and I was equally disappointed. The book looks impressive: Hardback! Generously sized! Nicely printed! But the contents amount to a grim, underwhelming, forced march (ha!) through a hellscape that reduces McCarthy’s brilliant novel into snatches of dialogue that amount to nothing. Where is the literary-ness? Where is the lyricism? Where is the new thing ideally produced when a work is adapted into another form? Not here. I’m not fundamentally opposed to graphic adaptations of literary works—I loved Brad Ricca and Courtney Sieh’s artful adaptation of Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House—but this ain’t it.

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Books I Read in January: Favorite and Least Favorite

This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In January, I read eight books. (You can find them and my short reviews here.) My favorite was Pierre Le-Tan’s A Few Collectors, a lovely, sweet, unexpected collection of small essays and delicate drawings about curious people the author knew who collected things and what happened to those collections. My least favorite was Chester Brown’s Paying for It, a sleazy, callous tour through the sex industry told by a man who sees women as cum receptacles.

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Books I Read: Can of Worms

Can of Worms by Catherine Doherty is a remarkable semi-autobiographical account of the author’s attempt to track down and reconnect with her birth mother. Unflinching and insistent, it peels back the layers on what happens when the mother-daughter bond goes wrong and the devastating effects on the truth-teller.

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Books I Read: Paying for It

The first time I read Chester Brown’s Paying for It was around the time it was originally published, I believe. I decided to buy a new copy and reread it when I heard that the woman who had been Brown’s “last girlfriend” before he started paying for it had directed a movie adaptation of the book. I seem to remember liking the book more the first time I read it. This time I found it kind of grim and sort of ick. I write about a fair amount of stuff related to this subject matter, and I even ran a website for a year where I posted anonymous emails men wrote to me about paying for it, but this comic is so dark and weirdly dissociated and lacking in any kind of empathy that I read it faster than usual just to get it over with. If you don’t know anything about paying for it or why guys pay for it or the politics of paying for it (particularly in Canada, Brown’s country of origin), this book may be of interest. Also, the drawings are cool. But to the Brown on these pages, sex workers are receptacles to be judged, used, and discarded. That take is retrograde, boring, and depressing.

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Books I Read: A Few Collectors

I’m in love with A Few Collectors by Pierre Le-Tan. It is a wunderkammer of a book, an extraordinary collection of small essays about collectors that Le-Tan knew and / or admired and / or encountered. I’m not even sure what this book is about, because I don’t think collecting is it. Perhaps how to live one’s life, or the importance of beautiful things, or the inherent transience of existence. I actually read it slower and slower because I didn’t want it to end. Also, the printing is beautiful. It’s a coffee table book in miniature.

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Books I Read: Ten Days in a Mad-House: A Graphic Adaptation

Ten Days in a Mad-House: A Graphic Adaptation, written by Brad Ricca, illustrated by Courtney Sieh, and based on the book by Nellie Bly, is an absolutely astonishing work that brings to life the terror, shame, and seemingly inescapable horror of being trapped in an abusive system. I’ve read the original Ten Days and I’m an investigative journalist, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. This book is a masterful adaptation of an original work as imaginative and evocative as the graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Sieh’s illustrations are especially moving, as she conjures up the faces of the women trapped in the asylum’s hell.

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Eat Me

I’m so happy to live in Los Angeles, where I can eat incredible food. A few of the wonderful things I’ve eaten as of late, from left to right: 1) the biscuit breakfast sandwich with bacon at Calabama in Hollywood, 2) the spinach and cheese borekas at Borekas in Sherman Oaks (they also have a location in Van Nuys), 3) the mangu at El Bacano in North Hollywood, 4) the protein omelette at Clark Street Diner in Franklin Village.

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Books I Read: Peepland

I didn’t care much for Peepland, which was written by Christa Faust and illustrated by Gary Phillips and Andrea Camerini. I felt like the story was all over the place and a bit hard to follow. But more importantly I largely bought it for the peep show setting, and the peep show world ended up mostly being set dressing. Pretty much everyone dies in the end. I guess I would’ve preferred something more illuminating of that world.

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Books I Read: The Structure Is Rotten, Comrade

I picked up a copy of The Structure Is Rotten, Comrade by Viken Berberian and Yann Kebbi because I thought the art was dazzling. And it is. The colors are arresting, the strokes are aggressive, and the pictures soar across the page. I’m also interested in Brutalism, with which this graphic novel (which it isn’t, exactly) concerns itself. But the first third features a woman whose sole role is to have giant tits and act like an idiot. When you’re a woman reading this book and this is all you see of yourself, it gets boring. Maybe do better, guys.

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Books I Read in 2025: Understanding Comics

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud was a reread for me. It was as inspiring, smart, and creative as I remembered. The only ding I’d give it is that because it was written sometime ago, it is less mindful about being inclusive of comics books creators who are not white and male than it would have been were it produced today. Other than that, a great read. It’s got me thinking about producing more comics.

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