McNinch, Carrie – You Don’t Get There From Here

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You Don’t Get There From Here #5

First off, sorry if I screwed up the images from the last review. I simply can’t see recent images when I’m editing these pages (anybody reading this familiar enough with WordPress to help me out on that one?) so… sorry. Carrie is back to the daily diary format with this issue, three panels per day, except for a longer nostalgic piece at the end about taking trips with her family when she was younger. At the very least, this issue helped clarify for me exactly what I don’t like about his format. After reading this and most of her other books in this format (and they are dense, dense things, plan on about an hour per comic if you pick one of these little things up), I still don’t know a lot of the fundamental details of her life. Is she seeing someone, and how on earth does she pay for anything, as she doesn’t appear to have a job? You could say that these things are none of my business, and you’d probably be right, but she spills so many intimate details on such a regular basis that these feel like vital parts of her story. For example, she often talks about overwhelming feelings of loneliness, of lacking any purpose at all. Is there somebody there with her, helping her through this, other than her friends? Occasionally a female friend is mentioned, and she talks about housemates, but most of the details there are left to the imagination. Anyway, it’s another solid issue, all my complaining notwithstanding. This covers almost a three month period, from June to September of last year (2007), in which Carrie deals with cancer in her friends, injuring her foot, jury duty, depression, and the loss of her favorite trail. You’re not going to find more bang for your buck anywhere, as $2 buys you a thickly packed little mini. I do worry about her though, which is odd considering that I don’t often feel that way after reading other intimate comics, so here’s hoping she settles into some sort of happy pattern with her life, even if it ends up making her comics less interesting…