Zervakis, Jenny – Strange Growths #16

Website where you can buy her comics

Strange Growths #16

Is there a good list of small press comics people out there who never got the acclaim/attention they deserved that anybody knows of? Granted, you could say “all of them” and be correct (as I went a lot of years wearing my King Cat shirt before anybody outside of a comics convention knew what it was), but I’m talking about inside of this little insular community. If there is a list and if Jenny Zervakis isn’t on it, then it’s a terrible list. I started reading these types of comics in 1993, and Jenny was making them back then. I think she got caught up in that “real life” stuff that seems to happen to damned near everybody, had a couple of kids and maybe found other priorities (as it’s certainly not like making comics is a way to make a living for far too many people), and I didn’t hear much about her for years. But she’s making comics again, and you whippersnappers who may have never heard of her should think about catching up. This is a collection of short pieces, as are most of her comics that I’ve seen. Stories in here include Jenny and her daughter going through the presidents while her daughter tries to find a female one, what happened to the moon people when the moon was dislodged from the earth, playing in the snow and the differences in how everybody reacts to it, a dream where Jenny saves a few castaways from drowning, images from a visit to the aquarium, a family at the end of its rope, some excellent questions about cats and dogs and how they perceive us, and a heartbreaker about their family losing their dog after she got spooked by a storm. It’s bad enough to lose any pet when they run off, but their dog was on seizure medication and there was very much a race against the clock to get to her before anything really bad happened to her. It’s a solid collection of stories and you should really think about picking it up. Where are we at on retrospectives of this stuff anyway? If I’ve been reading these things for 20 years now then there have to be some anniversaries coming up. Top Shelf or Fantagraphics, get on that…