I’ve read Phoebe’s stuff in Weirdo and other publications over the years, but she honestly never struck me as somebody that different or vibrant. I’m getting pretty used to being wrong these days. This book is one of the more important things put together in recent memory. Bill Griffith says on the back of the book “Read this book. Find out why comics are art.” I hate it when I have nothing to add to the press clippings, but there it is. This book documents her upbringing and some of her teen years, and I won’t even begin to hint at all the horrible things she goes through. The fact that she came out of it (from what Robert Crumb says in his intro, anyway) unscathed is nothing short of astonishing. The offhanded way that she describes some of these atrocities might be unsettling for, I don’t know, everybody out there, but that’s kind of the point. Her art is incredible as well. I haven’t often seen that level of expressiveness in characters, and those sketches… Listen, you can’t go wrong with this. It’s a creepy, uncomfortable read because of the subject material, but it’s a completely open an honest work, which is rare in any medium. She said herself that she let herself be this open because she figured that most people didn’t read comics anyway. Well worth your time and money.
