Krumpholz, Karl Christian – The Lighthouse in the City Volume 5

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The Lighthouse in the City Volume 5

I’m going to get a bit nitpicky here at the start, so if you don’t want to read it, just skip ahead a few lines. Or if you don’t even want to be bothered doing that, I thoroughly enjoyed this, so take that information and go about your day. See that “Volume 5” up there? Yeah, I did that. It’s not listed on the cover, on the spine, not even on the inside with the title. But this IS the fifth volume, and since this is a collection of daily strips, that seems relevant if you were looking for the whole journey. Even worse, I don’t know if you can even get all the volumes. The first volume is listed through Birdcage Bottom Books, the fifth through Kilgore, but as for everything in the middle, a quick Google search has failed me. Maybe the thinking is that only obsessives read small press comics, so those types of folks would research before buying. It might even be correct! It just strikes me as odd, as a needless way to confuse people. See all that complaining? Didn’t mention the quality of the book even one time, did I? That’s because it’s delightful, right around the best of the daily strips I’ve seen. That’s for a simple reason: Karl doesn’t force it. This might seem basic, but some people who do daily strips seem like they’re performing at times, or pushing for something funny and/or insightful when the truth is that they don’t have much to say on that particular day. And that’s fine! Karl’s solution is given away a bit on that cover, as he has no problem silently narrating a small happening from the day, or the absolute lack of anything happening. He’s also not boxed in by the same format (generally four panels, single page with these sorts of things), as some strips are a few pages, some are a single panel, some are all over the place. Flipping through this book before I started reading it I assumed it was a regular graphic novel (this is also where the lack of numbering failed me) just from the wildly different looks of the pages. Anyway, finally, this book covers the period from January through March 2021, which is less than a year ago as I’m writing this. Some shit went down during this period, to put it mildly, but since everybody reading this went through it too, I won’t go through it again. It’s an engaging collection, with funny and sad strips (and everything in between), and it makes me want to scour the internet to find those missing volumes. Give it a shot, and yes, that’s especially for people who are sick of the daily diary strip format. This proves that it still can be done well with a little ingenuity. $12