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The Mayans Were Right

Katherine sells this comic short a little bit by just calling it a sketchbook. For the new readers, my opinion on selling sketchbooks as comics is that it’s generally a bit of a cheat for conventions, a “look, I do too have a new book out this year!” kind of thing where you don’t have to put a lot of work into it because hey, you already keep a sketchbook. What actually appears in a sketchbook comic varies wildly from person to person, as this one shows clearly. There are some sketches towards the end of the book, sure, but even a good chunk of those have a story to them. Her review of the Avengers movie, for example, is pure personal pain from something unrelated to the movie. The bulk of this book is her travel diary from her trip to the Stumptown comics convention last year, at a time when her father was really sick and the family was getting the impression that the doctors weren’t telling them everything. Her father died during the course of this sketchbook, and the pain and general resentment at the universe for letting such a thing happen is clear on the page (or I’m projecting; I have no special insights into her brain). The convention was a bit of a bust for her (and a slow year in general from the sounds of it), but her observations on her trip and at the show itself elevate this far above the level of your average sketchbook comic. If you are like me and have a tendency to turn your nose up at sketchbook comics, don’t let this one pass you by, that’s all I’m saying. I picked this up mostly because it was the only new book she had at SPACE and I wanted to see what she had spent her time working on after thoroughly enjoying Nervenkrank #1 last year. Also, if she ever puts “No One Is Safe” out in a comics form, I can’t recommend that you get it highly enough. Her father was at the Kent State massacre in 1970 and this is the story of that event, although I must admit that I didn’t read the whole thing. Why? Because right now it exists as basically a large poster, and I felt like a weirdo standing there reading the whole thing at her table. Yes, even though she had it displayed like that to make it easier for people to read it standing at her table. But yeah, buy this sketchbook. If she keeps up on her current path she’s definitely going to “make it big” in this comics business, whatever that means these days. And if she doesn’t keep it up in comics, she’s still going to be a literary star. $2