A Comic Year - by Meg Reynolds (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Meg Reynolds has found her voice in the niche genres of diary comics and visual poetry. She excels in both elements of this hybrid genre: her skills as a writer and artist come together to form this powerful book. The content is vulnerable, honest, and effective. The characters are amusing, tragic, and sexy. The speaker sings and shouts from the page through tears and laughter and over spilled wine and ink. She reaches out to the reader with tenderness, loneliness, and agency. Meg's book will find its place on my shelf of visual poets, in a position of honor with the texts of Edward Gorey, Lynda Barry, Maira Kalman, and Bianca Stone. Each page is a poetic diary entry, illuminated with Meg's eerily beautiful drawings. These passages are ripe with puns, double entendres, tales of loss, and evidence of personal growth. This is a stunning accomplishment.

-Frances Cannon, author of The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big Little Frank

Melancholy and wry observation pervades the pages of Meg Reynolds's collection, A Comic Year. Part captain's log, part comic, part memoir and part instruction manual, this litany of days takes us on a journey of honest reflection. The candid voice, hilarious and adept at pointing out what it's like to be a poet and artist dating, is paired with sharp fine-line drawings, with enchanting detail and composition. Meg Reynolds is a natural comics artist, with the sensibility of a poet. Here we get the best of both worlds.

-BIANCA STONE, author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

A Comic Year is intimate, patient, and breath-taking. What is on the surface the story of a year in the life of a woman following a breakup unfolds and explodes into gorgeous layers of complexity, masterfully weaving together themes of love, desire, safety, family, poetry, time, and longing. Poems and drawings are at one turn heartbreaking, and then suddenly very funny, and then awe-inspiring and back again. Altogether, it is an indescribable triumph; a book that is just as much about everyone alive as it is about the author. Reynolds has given us a true gift.

-Sophie Lucido Johnson, author of Many Love

Virginia Woolf wrote, "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well" in A Room of One's Own. Meg Reynolds wrote, "I'm on my own again...My love for myself achieved delicate (precarious) purchase when I bought myself a sandwich: a BLT. Obviously". Reynolds was not afraid of releasing "the flying doubt monkeys from their brain cage" in her poetry comic, while she was a castaway in an urban desert. The documentary was a catharsis of sorts, with her and her micron pens & graphite drawing pencils. "To portray something in art is to worship it and make record. Here, I make an icon of my bedroom window. I pray to this close thing." I felt her energy in this book -survive- and I'm glad she did.

-Naoko Fujimoto