Excerpts
As if Carrie wasn’t already the hardest working woman in comics (go ahead, challenge me on that one; she’s also one of the hardest working artists in comic period), now she’s doing comics with excerpts from various non-fiction books that she’s read and enjoyed. As the cover says, there are seven books covered in here, 6 of them being two pages long and the last one being only one page. Which is a shame, as it’s the one I was most interested in (Kim Gordon’s “Girl in a Band), but I digress. Other excerpts deal with addiction and the benefits/cost of calling for help when you know it’ll get you in trouble (but might end up with a dead friend if you don’t), having a buddy in a strange country and the social status that comes with the “right” kind of ramen, the odd dichotomy of the Ramones playing at a historical location, meeting Sid Vicious on the street and ending up in a band with his friend, the hilarious moralizing that apparently goes on at the Playboy mansion when one of the ladies turns out to have done hardcore porn in her past instead of just getting naked and/or having sex with a 70+ year old creep who’s incapable of wearing pants, how the Hollywood (which was originally Hollywoodland, just in case you needed that for a trivia question) sign first got up that hill and the awful lights that initially came with it, and Kim Gordon starting to talk about why she produced Hole’s first album and what she thought of Courtney Love. None of these excerpts were enough to give you a sense of the overall story, but that’s why they’re just excerpts. I’m curious to read at least three of these books now, and the existence of this comic makes me wonder why I don’t use the amazing local library system for more than graphic novels. Time to change that, and now I have solid list of non-fiction books to start with.
