A Mess of Everything
By Miss Lasko-Gross

A Mess of Everything is the second volume in Miss Lasko-Gross's semi-autobiographical trilogy, picking up where the first volume, Escape from "Special," left off: self-effacing non-conformist Melissa is now in high school, where the stakes are higher as she copes with an anxiety-induced drug habit and an anorexic best friend. Melissa finds herself negotiating the kinds of everyday problems facing young adults today — such as alienating her friends with her uncomfortable honesty and accidentally breaking her best guy friend's heart. Eventually, her woes cause her to nearly flunk out of school, and by the end of the book Melissa faces the choice that we all do at some point: to take the risk and pursue her dreams or settle for a safer, more secure routine.

The unsentimental truthfulness that is the hallmark of Lasko-Gross's work is coupled with a raw but increasingly refined visual vocabulary. A Mess of Everything is an intense, honest, and funny memoir that holds appeal for anyone who is navigating, or who has ever grappled with, these issues. She expresses the awkward naïveté and inexperience of a young girl with the keen insights of a mature artist.

232-page full-color 6" x 9" softcover • $19.99
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

As you might have guessed from today's Daily Links post, we have several new books scheduled to arrive in comics shops tomorrow:

• Boody. The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers
• Ho! The Morally Questionable Cartoons of Ivan Brunetti
• Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941

Despite being mentioned by other sources, Paul Hornschemeier's Mother, Come Home is not on the official list, but you never know! Contact your local shop to confirm availability of these titles, and hit those links to see previews and gather more info. Happy shopping!

It's a honker today! Lots of good stuff out there:

• Review: Blogger Fionnchú considers the place of Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic in the pantheon of "big, long, thick" maximalist novels (e.g. Wallace, Joyce, DeLillo, Pynchon)

• Review: The Tearoom of Despair pens a loving ode to The Comics Journal: "...[I]t remains the best magazine about comics I’ve ever had the pleasure to read, offering in-depth analysis that has changed my entire opinion of certain comics... And it has some of the best interviews with comic writers, artists and editors that have ever peen published in any medium... Overall, it is still an absolute pleasure to sit down with a new issue of The Comics Journal and read about the craft and love for the medium that is out there... It has recorded the history of comics with style and panache, has published the liveliest letter page in magazines and has been unfailing in its bid to raise comics as an art form."

• Review: Rob Clough has a typically thoughtful take on The Complete Peanuts 1971-1972: "The latest volume of The Complete Peanuts finds Charles Schulz still at his peak... a perfect blend of fantasy, whimsy, jokes, heartbreak, topical references and sturdy characterization."

• Blurb: The Seattle Times' roundup of notable new local books includes a mention of Humbug: "Includes satirical takes on highway congestion, time travel, consumer reports and perspiration."

• Preview: Fictional or not, The Rack's Lydia recommends Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier ("Paul Hornschemeier's comics always make me miserable, and in a good way. This is a new edition of my favorite work he's done so far.") and Ho! The Morally Questionable Cartoons of Ivan Brunetti ("I like him a lot, but I think that Johnny Ryan should be cutting Ivan Brunetti a check every month and this collection of gag cartoons will show you why") from this week's new comics

• Preview: Rounding up the week's new comics, Jog highlights Boody. The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers ("you will doubt your sanity") and Ho! The Morally Questionable Cartoons of Ivan Brunetti ("excellent, take-no-prisoners gag panels")

• Preview: The Comics Reporter, same tune, different lyrics: on Boody, "Some of the greatest, oddest comics of all time"; on Ho!, "relentlessly naughty... I like these quite a bit"; and on Supermen!, "I liked this book quite a bit... a bunch of frequently weird, hallucinatory adventure fantasies"

• Preview: Atomic Romance also anticipates Supermen!: "In your face golden age stories by some of the greats of comic book history... I love this because it’s a time of experimentation. The writers and artists are learning their craft and there aren’t any established rules yet. Sure to please fans of I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets."

• Preview: Yet more blurbage about this week's new comics, this time from Blog @ Newsarama: on Boody, "comics super-genius Boody Rogers’ work... is almost as beautiful as it is weird. Or almost as weird as it is beautiful. At any rate, it’s really weird and really beautiful"; on Supermen!: "[A] must-read... I can’t recommend this one highly enough"

• Interview: Guttersnipe has a 2-part Q&A with Paul Hornschemeier: part 1 includes discusson of Mother, Come Home; in part 2 he discusses his Northwest tour this week

• Interview: Publishers Weekly chats with C. Tyler about her new book You'll Never Know, Book 1; of the book they say "[Tyler] recreates the experience of thought, in which past and present, parents and children, relationships and variations of the self co-mingle, intersect, and layer over one another. Evocative words and images appear in the background or the margins of Tyler’s panels, drawing out subtleties of the story, or clueing us in to unspoken emotional tones."

• Interview: The Daily Cross Hatch posts part 2 of their 3-part interview with Arnold Roth; topics covered: nudism, Hex signs, jazz

• Profile: The Oregonian presents an overview of the career to date of Paul Hornschemeier

• Things to see: The Argyle Academy pays homage to Michael Kupperman's Snake 'n' Bacon

• Good deed: Please consider donating to the S. Clay Wilson Special Needs Trust

Available today: Volume 1 of The Cloudy Collection, a folio of 7 letterpress prints by Steven Weissman (above), Tom Kaczynski (below) and 5 other sooperstar illustrators. Fantastic looking, love that colorway, and only $35! Buy it unless you're poor or hate excellent things.

If you happen to be in Los Angeles this Friday, April 3rd I highly recommend you run on over to Katie Vonderheide and Christopher Gere's SYNCHRONICITY SPACE  for a spiritual experience!

Now available for preview and pre-order: Luba, the long-awaited hardcover sequel to Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez. This 600-page tome collects over 100 stories chronicling the experiences of the imposing matriarch and her extended family in America. This book is scheduled to be in stock in early April and in stores approximately 4 weeks later.

View a photo & video slideshow preview embedded here. Click here if it is not visible, and/or to view it larger in a new window (recommended). And at our product info page you can download a PDF of an exclusive 26-page excerpt!

• Review: For Robot 6's "What Are You Reading?" column, guest contributor Kevin Church says of Sam's Strip, "It was either going to be the biggest success in the world or end within two years. Since it’s all collected in one volume now, you can likely work out how it went down."

• Review: Las Vegas Weekly gives Sam's Strip 4 stars: "How on earth did Sam's Strip... fail to set the funny pages on fire back in 1961...? The answer -- provided through this complete collection of 500 strips -- is that the time just wasn't right. Well, it's certainly right now."

• Review: Thought Balloonist Charles W. Hatfield examines Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw: "Shaw is very good and getting better... With Bottomless Belly Button he has pulled off something remarkable: a 700-plus page book that doesn't feel like a stunt but rather is perfectly proportioned, intimate, and subtle, a privileged entryway into a private world that nonetheless feels universal in its emotive resonance and applicability... Bottomless Belly Button has depths. It evokes the power of memory and the phenomenal richness of ordinary experience with the sort of Proustian precision of observation and recall that alternative comics have been chasing since Spiegelman."

• Review: The title of The Washington Post's Express Night Out review of The Complete Peanuts 1971-1972 makes what is surely the first reference to Spin¨al Tap in a Peanuts review. From the review: "[These] volumes... are a spectacular tribute to Schulz's work... References to Bob Dylan's age aside (one strip mentions his 30th birthday — yikes!), Peanuts remains surprisingly fresh and timeless. Although Charles Schulz wrote these strips over 20 years ago, the ongoing popularity of the made-for-TV holiday specials... means that the Peanuts gang continue to remain relevant in popular culture. It would be a pity, however, to relegate Peanuts to special occasions only — Schulz's work should and can be enjoyed all year round."

• Review: Sacha Peet says "I finally read Unlovable by Esther Pearl Watson the other day. I love it. The drawings are great, and the life of Tammy Pierce is enthralling."

• Preview: Rick Klaw got Blazing Combat in his mailbag; we suspect he'll have a review up soon

• History: Carnal Nation continues their look at the history of the Tijuana Bibles

• Events: See original pages from Ben Catmull's Monster Parade at the Heroes and Villains art show at Rock Paper Scissors in Oakland, opening this Friday April 3rd, 6-9 pm (via Ben's blog)

• Things to see: The most recent batch of sketchbook drawings & comics from Anders Nilsen

I don't buy many serial comics these days. Okay, to be perfectly honest, I don't buy any. Omega the Unknown was the only ongoing mainstream comic I've "collected" more than one or two issues of over the last several years. And even that I probably would have enjoyed it more in collected form, but it was actually kind of fun to get into the habit of buying a serial comic again. Unfortunately, once that ended, nothing else caught my eye. I have a neighborhood comic shop that I stop into fairly often when I'm out walking my daughter, and more often than not I come out empty-handed, even when I have money burning a hole in my pocket. To the point where it's almost amazing to me that, as a die-hard comics fan, there's virtually nothing for me that I want to read in floppy form. Or at least buy in floppy form. Is it comics, or is it me? I truly have no idea at this point, I just know I keep leaving the store empty-handed. But it's hard to indulge in a random superhero comic for a bit of brief, escapist fun even if I wanted to, when the comic costs more than than the lunch I'm gonna eat while reading it, and the lunch will last longer (even tho' I'm a pretty fast eater). 

Which brings me to last week, when I kept hearing about this Muppets comic that Roger Langridge did.  I like the Muppets just fine, but have no abiding affection for them. But I do think Langridge is a phenomenally talented cartoonist, and after seeing it pop up on blog after blog last week, on Friday I was happy to have an excuse to visit my local shop.

It's a very well done comic. I can't say I flipped over it. I mean, it's a Muppets comic. But it's the goddamn best motherfucking licensed Muppets comic you could ever imagine (though I could easily imagine a totally bitchin' unlicensed version by someone like Matt Furie). It plays to the strengths of the creator and the creation. Hell, it's not just well-done, it's impeccably well done. 

Which brings me to two thoughts:

(1) Why aren't there more comics like this? What does is say about modern comics that the closest thing I can find to something I want to buy is a licensed comic featuring characters I haven't watched on TV in 20 years and have no abiding nostalgia for? By a cartoonist I'd rather ultimately read doing his own stuff, if he could afford to? Why are the editorial departments of mainstream comics so stultified that in 20+ years of Star Comics, Cartoon Network Comics, Archie Comics, etc., I've rarely seen anything as unimpeachably professional as this? 

(2) Why does Boom comics (whom I know almost nothing about except that they've launched this kids line of Muppets and Incredibles comics), despite clearly having the editorial awareness to put together some solid storytelling, engage in the practice of multiple cover variants?

Maybe these are two wildly disjointed questions. But I almost don't want to buy the second issue of the Muppets because I know that Boom  is publishing these (and the Incredibles) in multiple, variant editions. They're free to do this, of course, and I would expect nothing less from the vast majority of fly-by-night snake-oil salesmen that have made up the bread and butter of the mainstream comic book industry for the last 20 years (not to be confused with the fly-by-night snake-oil salesmen that made up the industry for the 60 years prior to that). But I'd like to think that a company smart enough to hire a talented cartoonist like Roger Langridge and publish a very solid comic is also conscious enough to not want to engage in the kind of confidence schemes that almost ruined the industry in the 1990s and continues to paint comics in the eyes of some as more Bernie Madoff than Art Spiegelman.

I'm a day late and a dollar short to this soapbox, it's true, like your grandpa complaining about those damn "kids today". Variant covers have been a reality for over a decade and I've rarely given a shit. But they're usually associated with shitty, desperate money-grabs (Marvel owes you an apology, Mr. President). It's depressing to see them associated with exactly the kind of comics that this industry needs: solid, professional comics for kids that don't cater to the usual genres/demographics.

At any rate, it is a pretty good comic, and a great one for the young 'uns.  

A preview of Miss Lasko-Gross' new graphic novel, A MESS OF EVERYTHING, is up now at ACT-I-VATE. I recently visited my parents in California and took this book with me to read. I accidentally left it there, and this weekend my mom told me how much she liked it. "Poor Melissa!," she said. Go read the preview and pre-order, already!

"Special Nice Cosmic Hyperdeath" is the name of the show, at Secret Headquarters this Friday, new and newish drawings and paintings, also, very small run minicomics of Josh Simmons' recent stories: "In a Land of Magic," "Cockbone," and "Batman."