this is one awesome comic book. my friend Joe handed it to me and said “this is one of the best comic books i have read, ever”. i was very surprised, joe is a total old school comic book geek you know . so i took a good read at this. and guess what? it’s beautiful. it made me cry. it’s delicately narrated. a little distant, but it’s a sort of “sensible distance”. or sensitive distance. it’s full of those “comic book moments”, i mean, do you ever see something and think “that could have never been done in a movie, or in a book, or in a song…” i mean, there are things that fit perfectly into their format. it’s not like, say, a movie is a better format than a short story, or a photograph is better than a painting. it’s more like they have their particularities and there are effects that each one of those formats is capable of and the other is not. and with a disputed genre/art form like comic books i’m always tempted to find those “moments” and say: see, see: comics are unique, they have a way of their own, they can do things unachievable by other means. so this one book does it all the time. beautiful instant one page cross referenced palimpsestual story telling/literary criticism. words and pictures and layout telling the complexity of life and lives. and its dark. oh so dark. read this and then pass it with blankets by craigh thompson for a glimpse of the subtleties of american life.