Not Funny Ha-Ha
By Leah Hayes, Fantagraphics, 200 pages, $19.99
Comics often serve instructional purposes, organizing information into easy-to-understand step-by-step processes. With Not Funny Ha-Ha, Leah Hayes uses the medium to create "a handbook for something hard." With clarity and compassion, she walks readers through the emotions and medical decisions involved in having an abortion. Using two different women in two different situations as her hypothetical case studies, the author calmly outlines the feelings and experiences you should expect (Hayes addresses her reader, intimately, as "you") when you choose to undergo either a medical procedure, induced by pills, or a surgical one, in a clinic. The drawings throughout are affecting and vulnerable, with each woman's face worried and blushing but always manifest on the page with reassuring solidity. Hayes's bunched and slanted lettering is as tenderly expressive as her portraiture – every mark of her hand is set to paper with pure empathy. This book is sure to be a comfort and friend to women who need it for years to come.
Hip Hop Family Tree Book Three: 1983-1984
By Ed Piskor, Fantagraphics, 112 pages, $32.50
Picking up Ed Piskor's comic-strip history of hip hop with this volume gives you entrée to the culture at the point in 1983 and 84 when the whole world was starting to take notice. Run-DMC is on MTV in heavy rotation. The Fat Boys do promos with Pepsi and Swatch. Whodini goes platinum. Significant behind-the-scenes events are also under way: Chuck D meets Flava Flav; The Beastie Boys start drinking Brass Monkey; social worker DJ Scott La Rock galvanizes homeless teen KRS-One. Piskor's savvy conceit is to cartoon all this fomenting activity in the frothy style of the era's Marvel comics – pulpy paper, Ben-Day dots, and all. That larger-than-life idiom and headlong pacing perfectly suit early hip hop's convoluted conflicts and outsized dramatis personae (Piskor's rendition of lisping, hustling Russell Simmons, for one, is simply iconic). The cartoonist's encyclopedic love for his subject matter – and his energetic depiction of its beefs, battle-raps and gradual rags-to-riches rise to fame – makes Hip Hop Family Tree a rigorous, scholarly work of pop culture history, masquerading as great comics.
Bright-Eyed at Midnight
By Leslie Stein, Fantagraphics, 224 pages, $26.50
"Life is messy," Leslie Stein writes early on, in one of her helter-skelter comic-strip diaries. "Life is non-linear." Fittingly, Stein's clamorous, colourful pages swoon between childhood memories and anecdotes of daily life, or between dreamy impressionist doodling and full-on action-painter freak-outs. The results read like Kandinsky illustrating Virginia Woolf – less a conventional diary than a stream of consciousness brought vibrantly to life. The strips in Bright-Eyed at Midnight bear oneiric traces of their beginnings in the wee hours of morning, when Stein would finish her job tending bar and cartoon a page chronicling some aspect of her life, every day throughout 2014. Faces aren't fully drawn so much as they float to the surface of the page, half-recalled. Locations, clothing and objects all get implied with the barest of lines, rather than sketched in detail, as though they are only faint hints of memory. Stein's recreations of life – especially inner life, those reflective moments alone with oneself – are fluid and evanescent, remarkably true to the texture of actual experience.