msjamgochian'sinfinitebooklist

A compelling, crafty, and often times funny look at Seattle comic artist Ellen Forney's battle with bipolar disorder, from diagnosis to finally finding the correct medication cocktail. Forney doesn't allow personal vanity to get in the way of this raw depiction of mental illness, and her beautiful artwork stands on its own. She deftly confronts the questions that many artists face when weighing 'fixing themselves:' Will it destroy my art? Will I be less creative? Not to be missed for Forney fans, Seattleites, or readers who enjoy Alison Bechdel's work. Grade 11+

A haunting look at what happens when a kid slips through the cracks (which happened to be gaping wide throughout the ubiquitous 'hands-off-I'm-too-busy-having-a-breakdown/affair/addiction/vision" parenting style of the 70s and 80s). Most of us remember Jeffrey Dahmer as the guy who ate people, but Derf Backderf knew him as the guy who entertained his classmates with an ongoing and entertaining schtick (imitating his mother's seizures), the guy who didn't quite fit in yet maintained a bizarre celebrity status (including his own club), and, eventually, the guy who could finish a six-pack in mere seconds and always had a bottle at the ready to drown out the darkness at home and in his head. Backderf masterfully crafts a thoroughly researched cautionary and poignant tale of a lost young man without glossing over details or over sympathizing. Don't miss it - and pair it with Jeff Jensen's Green River Killer for more graphic serial killer memoir. Click here fo...

When author and artist Belle Yang returns home to escape an abusive stalker boyfriend, she finds more than simple refuge. Her father, who named her "forget sorrow" in honor of his family's new beginning in the United States, regales her with tales of her ancestors' troubles in Manchuria during WWII. Belle rediscovers herself as her father dishes out doses of her family history, and eventually makes her way to China to reconnect with her relatives. FS has been compared with Maus and Persepolis, and fans of those books will find much to enjoy here, but Yang's earthy black strokes and dark-yet-funny storytelling mostly resemble David B.'s Epileptic , a book often left unmentioned in graphic memoir lists. An excellent addition to any memoir study. Grade 8+

Booklist, June 1, 2007 In this structurally complicated memoir, Hornschemeier portrays the last evening of a visit with his parents in Ohio that, casual in itself, carries the tensions of his ambitions and of meeting, when he returns to Chicago, longtime correspondent-fan Juliane. “Paul and the Magic Pencil,” a comics story resembling Jay Ward’s Peabody and Sherman cartoons, which Hornschemeier is drafting seemingly as an exercise in self-encouragement, frames the main action, a nighttime walk with his father. The walk in turn encompasses Paul’s mental flashbacks to “Paul and the Magic Pencil,” a confrontation with a bigger boy when he was about sixth-grade age, the story behind the scar on the neck of a convenience-store clerk, and a comic-book account of the paradoxes of Zeno. The visit is the most realistically rendered narrative element, and each flashback is differently styled in figuration and coloration. If there is an educible point to this calm slice of common life, it is that...