By Leslie Stein (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-838-0
After graduating from the New York School of Visual Arts Leslie Stein began producing astoundingly addictive cartoon strips in her self-published ‘zine Yeah, It Is. With a Xeric Grant for her efforts, she started the even-better comicbook Eye of the Majestic Creature, seamlessly blending autobiographical self-discovery, surreal free-association, philosophical ruminations, nostalgic reminiscences and devastatingly dry wit to describe life filtered through a seductively meta-fictional interior landscape. This lady laconically tans under truly different suns and the results are both enchanting and entrancing.
Here she bravely offers a further intimate peek inside a unique head via a gloriously off-kilter selection of full-colour diary-strips: all created in the wee small hours as she juggled incessant insomnia and the skewed demands and commitments of being a bartender working night shifts, performing in a band and battling an obsessive urge to draw stories…
“Beginning at the stroke of Midnight…†from the first moments of 2014 and every evening/slash morning thereafter, regardless of her location, physical condition and state of weariness or inebriation, Stein crafted a comic – one per night in a free-ranging variety of styles encompassing watercolour, line-work, collage, found imagery and even sheer abstractions – only ending her self-appointed task on January 1st 2015.
Now the very best of those pictorial therapies – sweet, incisive, charming, obscure, self-destructive, self-incriminating, nostalgic, hopeful, delusional, revelatory and just plain indefinable – populate the pages of a lavish hardback chronicle which is utterly intoxicating.
Day-trippers and interested parties can share her realised thoughts on creating stories, memories of the 1980s, school, junk food, Summer Camp, bar lives, New York in the early hours, boys, men, rehearsals, colours, lettering, pets, Jimi Hendrix, romance, regular customers, gigs, European travel, hero-worship, fruit, fans and all the other minutiae and major events which make up one year in a life, seen here partitioned into ‘Winter’, ‘Spring’, ‘Summer’, ‘Fall (& Winter Again)’, a sweetly painful biographical examination of ‘Four Christmases’ all wrapped up with an uplifting ‘Epilogue’…
The journal glyphs are all delivered in a smoothly raw, primitive yet deliciously engaging, self-deprecating manner utterly impossible to resist and if you’ve ever drunk-dialled and regretted it, imagine the increased horror of drawing and posting an entire comic strip before you wake up, sober up and realise just what you’ve done…
A mesmerising, absurdist, whimsically seductive and pictorially gratifying invitation into a singularly creative existence and fabulously rewarding cartoon experience: one no serious fan can afford to miss.
© 2015 Leslie Stein. All rights reserved.