Lapp, Dave – Window #13

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Window #13

These Window comics just seem to keep hiding themselves in the morass that is my desk. The last few issues in this series (which I last reviewed six months ago) were just found alongside my desk, having fallen there who knows how long ago. Just a little peek into the “professional” set-up I have around here for reviewing comics, and one more reminder for you to nudge me a bit if it’s been a few months and I still haven’t reviewed your comic. Chances are that they’re buried under something or have fallen off my desk entirely. So! It’s the second-to-last issue of Window, and it’s another damned good one. I used the story on the inside front cover as a sample, mostly because anybody who’s lived in a big city has either heard or participated in a conversation something like this one. Up to and including the moment at the end when the people on the street lose interest and the person on their balcony/window/roof continues shouting for a bit until it finally sinks in that their audience is gone. Next up is the meat of the comic, a story about a man remembering his time during the Vietnam war. He was just a local kid at the time, and didn’t know how to handle the casual nature with which dead people were just left lying around. He also detailed several encounters with grenades, claymores, traps and other things that, in hindsight, probably should have killed him. Instead he just played with them with his friends and lucked out in the fact that all of the explosives he found were either duds or he didn’t hit them in just the right way to make them go off. Next there’s a story (told by Dave’s brother or father (?)) of a therapy session between Carl Lapp and a patient who was losing weight rapidly and her various excuses as to why she wouldn’t eat certain meals. Finally there’s a long and fairly heartbreaking story on the back cover of an overheard conversation of a woman on a train talking about her aging cat and how she can’t get it to poop in a litterbox, and how the cat conquers all her efforts to nudge her back in the right direction. Who else is going to put a 20 panel story on the back cover for your amusement? Appreciate that level of dedication when you find it, folks. Anyway, one more issue to go, and I still think that somebody, anybody, should be putting out a collected edition of his work. This is that rare combination of fantastic art along with stories about sections of society that will be priceless to any future historians. No price, because they’re mostly not in print, but ask Dave about them, maybe he still has a few lying around…