I have a feeling that I've read this somewhere else before… have a vague memory of seeing a copy at Ladyfest Manchester and poaching it to read in a corner from the zine stall before returning it later on...
This comic has that kind of realistic, almost illustrated style to it, where people actually look something like people and so on and so forth, but there's also really good use of simple shading and lines. I like the effect very muchly.
Basically a lot of the stories are your kind of girl meets boy, boy disappears or else weird guy who lives on his own and is going a bit crazy, or mother/daughter relationship type things. If I were reading this kind of stuff in a short story/ novel type format I would no doubt find it excruciatingly bad and painful to the point of throwing it across the room. However, what I find really weird and exciting about comics is that, in this form, it’s somehow a completely compelling read. I can't figure out why this is; but I'm quite happy with that so...
Hmmm, maybe a lot of the stuff here is easy to relate to on a really human, personal level; the start and drift of a relationship to its end; how people deal with life and all that malarkey...good stuff, well drawn, characters with real depth. There's also a cartoonist star sign thing on the back cover which made me chuckle.
David Birchall