Cat Person was an impulse borrow from the library, because I am a person and I like cats. What I found in Seo Kim's Cat Person is either a highly sophisticated piece of modern art beyond my comprehension or a bunch of barely connected doodles from a professional cartoonist that she did in her off time and decided to publish. There is no introduction, afterword, or anything really to explain what this book is. It's just the art.

The art in Cat Person depicts Kim going about her daily life as a slightly awkward, lonely person who forever feels like they aren't "adult." She plays with the cat, she cleans, she poops, she burns a grilled cheese, and she mismanages her sleep schedule. It's incredibly mundane, but in that mundanity, highly, highly relatable. She struggles like I'm struggling: sometimes her drawings are barely comprehensible pencil sketches, where you can feel the inner fight to produce something, anything. Sometimes the drawings are in effortless full color. This book would be an anthropologist's gold mine for what run-of-the-mill life in the 21st century contains. Like, idk, man, we were covered in cat fur and trying real hard against impossible odds to exist.

My question for Cat Person is about intent. Maybe this is a bunch of art a cartoonist made on little napkins while she waited for her food to microwave and they mean nothing. Maybe she is depicting her daily life because the true message is that life, no matter how silly or basic or boring, is art. Even the mundane is powerful, profound, and worthy of attention.

I literally cannot tell what is going on here. But I laughed and the drawings are real cute, so three stars?

As someone who is wary of the DC universe in general, but in love with Neil Gaiman's Sandman, I've been meaning to read a John Constantine comic for awhile. I've spotted flashes of him in cartoons, or Gaiman storylines, but it was just the brief wink of gritty charm and devastating magic. When I picked up Constantine: The Hellblazer at the library, I knew the time had come to for a longer look. No other storyline is going to appeal to me more than one written by a woman of color who is excited to make John's bisexuality explicit on the page.

With London a little too full of his past, John jumped the pond to New York City. New faces, new places, new start, right? Incorrect. Just because this cityscape is American doesn't mean things are different. John still has the worst luck and finds himself in the most impossible scrapes (very Clint Barton "Okay, this looks bad, but..." vibe). The detective struggles to relate to his fellow humans. Ever since he "crossed over" to the magical world, it's been much easier to chat up demons, ghosts, and other creatures that go bump in the night. An entourage of ghosts count as friends, right?

The answer is a solid maybe. Demons love a good back-stabbing, and a giant tentacle monster is devouring his ghost friends. London's calling him back, and he's got to put that past to rest. remember that time he was in queer magic rockband lol

"Maybe" is a good way to describe my reading experience. I enjoyed the art, and John's bisexuality was lovely and spoiled me rotten for good rep. His love interest, Oliver, is adorable. From my peeks of him, I knew John is supposed to be the smarmy bastard type, the one who straddles the line between hero and anti-hero. What I didn't expect was him to be so...stupid about it? John's actions aren't morally ambiguous so much as morally dense. I can follow his logic up to a certain point, but then he seems to make a bad decision out of churlish, contrarian impulse. On the next page he bemoans how shit he is, and I'm left confused. Does he seek redemption or not? Does he want to live with humans, monsters, or a combination? Worse, the narrative can't seem to decide how to frame John either: he is good, evil, charming, sympathetic, repugnant, alarmingly bright, and depressingly dim-witted all at once.

When the comic finished, I was left with a vague feeling of sadness. Like, this poor moron. If you want redemption, you seek redemption. It is that simple and that hard.

The Story of My Tits has been haunting me awhile, waiting on the library shelves until I got the gumption to pick it up. With a family history of cancer, Hayden's story was something I needed to read.

A memoir in the sense that the story revolves around Hayden's changing relationship with her breasts, the comic touches on many different topics. Familial love, identity, responsibility, romance, dreams/goals, changing living spaces: The Story of My Tits comes close to autobiography. Rarely does a blurb hit the nail on the head for what a book is about and what journey it takes the reader on, but this one does. I giggled and teared up and called my mother. Hayden's thoughts on the untouchability of ill people, how they sit with us, yet are very far away, were especially poignant. Her thoughts on having children smacked me upside the head in a good way.

Overall, Hayden's memoir is touching, bittersweet, smart, and needed. I definitely recommend it to anyone staring down the barrel of cancer.