Three Zines from the Minneapolis Central Library

I love autobio comics and graphic memoirs. The first one I read, for a college class, is one of the greatest: Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis. The book made me realize how powerfully a raw and vulnerable coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of political turmoil (in this case, revolutionary Iran) could make that history effectively stick. After finishing Persepolis, I wanted more. I also liked Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums and Embroideries. Then I moved to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a comic about the Holocaust that, according to his agency (and I wouldn’t disagree), “almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves.” Alison Bechdel continued this work in the 2000s with Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The intimacy of the drawings and observations was a revelation.

By making a practice of drawing a comic on a periodic basis—every month, every week, every day—some autobio comic writers, by referencing how current events affect them, end up giving us a personal perspective on history in real time. Nowhere have I found this more apparent than in John Pena’s beautifully drawn and aptly named Daily Geology series, which I first saw when Carleton College’s Perlman Teaching Museum in Northfield, MN did an exhibition of his work in 2013.

But I’ve had trouble finding other similar series of comics and zines by writer/artists—so I’m grateful to the Minneapolis Central Library and their third-floor display of zines (many local), which I discovered when I was wandering around the building. Each delicate copy is fitted into a type of sturdy clear sleeve that for some reason I am inordinately fond of. I recently read and enjoyed three of them. With M.S. Harkness’s “May 2015,” I was struck (as I was when reading The Complete Persepolis and Daily Geology) by how powerfully the self-portrait in a comic can be used to illustrate the changing ways writers feel about and see themselves from moment to moment. In “May 2015,” Harkness’s self-portrait varies widely in appearance; on the cover, her likeness is satisfyingly large and leering, like a predatorial goddess still filled with the excitement and possibility of her impending airport conquest; in the final frame, drawn with less detail, a Harkness diminished by disappointment is slumped in her seat looking so small she might at any minute slip out of it onto the floor.

My favorite drawings were probably those of C. Furnas in Crazy Like a Fox: Rats! (Volume Number 2). The lovely spiky figures have a lightness and charm that help us to bear the pain of Fox, who struggles with schizophrenia--so, too, does the depiction of (many of) the characters as animals (a jellyfish, a dodo, a snake, a worm). Fox attempts suicide, has trouble finding a place to live, and experiences the overpowering effects of medication, but there is still hope and beauty in this world.

Cat Raia’s drawings in Forever and Always, P.S. Suck It (Issue V) are the kind that fill the page almost to the edge, and often images are not separated by panels. There is a pleasure in letting your eye travel around the page in a different order each time to take in every word and mark. Prefaced as “A collection of correspondence from Isaac Zafft illustrated by Cat Raia,” this trippy, poetic, and moving zine features well-styled references to Olde English Malt Liquor and the war on drugs and an image of a half organic/half mechanical creature consisting of two human heads on a spider’s body.

There is also a constant undercurrent of grief and longing. In two endnotes, Raia describes how Zafft was fatally shot during a robbery at a greenhouse in 2014 and three people were eventually arrested. For some reason, it’s these handwritten notes that drive home to me the power of this genre. I’m grateful to see zine and comic writers searching for the right forms rather than following rules that might or might not make sense when applied to their specific projects. “Naming their names is unimportant,” Raia says of the individuals who took Zafft away from her, “and looking at their mug shots was a mistake.”