I’m reading my way through the zine collection at the downtown public library in Minneapolis. I was attracted to the pearly tones of this pretty little comic done in pencil and watercolors. The book tells a simple, familiar family story, but there are fun surprises in the visuals (Miss Cat-Face’s parents, for example, are dressed chin to toe as if they are about to attend an 18th-century evening church service—complete with a cameo pin and a dark frock coat—even as Miss Cat-Face’s closet more closely resembles that of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; also, readers are perhaps meant to make something of the fact that while Miss Cat-Face and her mother are depicted as tranquil feline-people, the male characters in the story are drawn as, respectively, a raging bull and a roaring Tyrannosaurus Rex). The pictures are lovely—Jennifer Walker can really draw—and they carry the story, alongside some sparse text, well. Not an earth-shattering story, and yet the book was a real pleasure to hold and page through. My review might now be longer than the whole book, which says something about its impact.
