Short and sweet. Jen is a city kid, used to the noise and bustle of New York. When her parents divorce, Jen is pulled a long with her mom's dream to live on a small farm upstate. Jen is saddled with feeding chickens, yard work, and helping run the booth at the weekly farmer's market. Also, every weekend her mom's boyfriend's two daughters arrive to share Jen's bedroom. It's hard to get used to all of these changes! But the tensions are all resolved fairly quickly. I really enjoyed the very charming illustrations of chicks, farm cats, frogs, snakes and owls.

This reads like a series of diary excerpts mixed with sketchbook pages. One of my favorite sections tells of Crewes's teenage love for the character of Willow from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which somehow did not tip her off to the fact she was gay, though maybe it should have. Crewes describes the self-knowledge of her own queerness as a secret envelope that she gave to herself, a message that took her a long time to open. She came out once in the high of a good New Year's party to friends, but then retreated from it. When she finally got to the place of fully accepting herself, it made so many things fall into place. I really liked the art, which is loose and sketchy, though I almost wished the book were longer, or that a bit more had been pack into it's pages.

An extremely raw and honest memoir with meditations on alcohol addition, rape, bad sex, and the low level sexual harassments the author faces daily as a woman who commutes in New York. Williams has a powerful voice, weaving together memories and quotes from books with observations and admissions. I heard the author speak last year and was very impressed, but procrastinated on reading the book because of the heavy subjects. But it was a faster and less painful read than I feared- the humor and self-insight kept me turning the pages. I read it all in one sitting.

Penny hates her temp job, hates her roommate, loves but clashes often with her only sister, and at 26 has not figured out what she wants to do with her life. She's working at her sister's health juice booth at a convention when she meets two enthusiastic nerds who make short horror films. Their budgets are as small as their hearts are large, but Penny decides to sign on to the project and is soon helping with almost every aspect: scriptwriting, scheduling, casting, making props, lights, sound, acting, directing. It's wonderful to watch her discover a group of oddballs with whom to laugh, plan, and splash fake blood. They are working on a deadline: they want to submit the film to Splattercon, a local horror film fest, so they need to finish a full cut of the film in two months. Will they make it? (Even if they don't, the real win is the friendships they make a long the way.)

The Nib continues to publish some of the very best comics. Of personal local interest to me was the piece by Sarah Mirk, Vreni Stollberger and Joyce Rice about PG&E's involvement in the last few California Wildfires seasons and their subsequent "defensive blackouts". In October 2019 they cut power to 2.8 million people, many of my family members included. I have hosted friends who had to evacuate from fires 3 of the past 4 years.

Another education guide from Isabella Rotman, a very good companion (though aimed at older readers) to Wait, What? A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up.

I am a HUGE fan of Sarah Mirk, and this zine series captures her tone perfectly- witty, poignant, political, timely. She posted these comics almost daily on instagram for a year, and I enjoyed them so much. Highly recommend reading these stories, either in book form or online, and looking into her other work.