The Red Stiletto
It’s hard to avoid getting a little nostalgic as you get older (kids, trust me on this one). The farther away you get from childhood, the more you romanticize the whole time period, whitewashing the bad parts and honing in on the good. Marc does an excellent job here of going back to the past but leaving it as it was, not as he wished it would be. Um, in this fictional story. This is the tale of an old friend reaching out after being out of touch for many years and the wave of memories the reconnection brings up to the surface. Hey, this could be a true story, I just kind of doubt it and it really doesn’t matter for the sake of the story. The main character (forever unseen) gets a letter in the mail from his old childhood friend containing an elaborate picture he had drawn when he was 5. This sets off a retelling of the life story of his friend: how they had been inseparable as children, how her father had killed himself, how she had drifted away from him in high school and had never responded to his attempts to reconnect. Good luck reading this without thinking of your own times gone by; in my book that means Marc has succeeded in this comic. The only thing that was a little odd to me was the timing and inclusion of a short story towards the end of the comic. I get it, the returning friend’s father had killed himself and his family was shocked to discover that he was actually a prolific (and unpublished) writer, and the friend was taking the time to read a story on the flight back. It’s a decent little story, just an odd choice to break up the comic with 8 pages of text right at the end. Still, a minor quibble. If you’re the one person in the world who has never felt nostalgic you can probably skip this, for everybody else this is well worth a look. $4
