Memoir of single mother working low wage cleaning jobs. It struck me that it seemed like all of these people hiring a cleaning service are living way out in the middle of nowhere. Not sure if that's how it really was, or if the author just made the houses seem isolated to illustrate her own isolation while cleaning them. Made me feel very lucky to not have to depend on my old car to get to work. Had some pretty good depictions of what its like to be stuck in poverty, and thus to be stuck in some really shitty housing. I know if I was living in some of the houses she lived in with her daughter, it would be too difficult to accept I was stuck there to try to make it seem like a home.

More of Sattouf's memoir of his super messed up childhood. His small town he lives in with his family (not Homs, which is kind of the big city to his town). Actually, his childhood didn't seem that messed up, but he was noticing (or almost noticing) all kinds of horror around him. Some of the caricatures make me wonder if Sattouf is settling personal scores with people in his past by making relatives he didn't like hideous. Everyone is very cartoonish & caricatured, but still I wonder. Arab of the Future also makes me wonder what kind of relationships Sattouf has with his Father & his extended family.

I've decided that this series could also be called "Little House in the Levant". The dad is kind of like a lot of those "Frontier Dads" like Pa in little house, who just picks up and takes his family wherever for unknown reasons. I'm looking forward to the next volume.

Disturbing & nuts, probably a little more so than the movie. Similar to Watchmen, it looks at the superhero genre through a more realistic lens--showing that superheroes in real life would fall onto a spectrum between pathetic & psychotic. The depiction of the superhero as middle-upper class white fighting against lower-class POC works as a critique (though I'm not sure how intentional), since the main characters are not entirely sympathetic or reliable. Looking forward to reading the sequels, & see how Millar & Romita's sensibilities evolve out of the Myspace age.

Read this after the 1st Kick-ass collection. I might rate this as slightly more disturbing. At one point I felt like yelling "but hit-girl, statistically many people on death row are innocent!" (so I was glad she never tried to shoot out the 4th wall or anything like that). What I think makes Hit-Girl more disturbing than Kick-Ass (at least the 1st one) is that Kick-Ass gets beat up a lot on his crusade against petty crime, but Hit-Girl is an unstoppable menace like Anton in No Country for Old Men. To me, that's a disturbing idea even when that menace is deployed against unspeakably brutal mobsters, and it's especially disturbing when you also consider that she's kind of an unreformed child-soldier.

More psychotic action. While I feel like Kick-Ass/Dave is sympathetic, I kind of enjoy watching shit constantly going sideways on him. Also makes the good point that by becoming a super-hero, one guarantees that they will get the tragic super-hero origin story, if they didn't already have one. Also liked how in a showdown between superheroes and supervillains, all anyone else can see are a bunch of random costumed people fighting and causing mayhem.

Combination graphic memoir of Ayn Rand & a history of her philosophical influence on the late & post-Cold war economy & the lead up to the crash of 2008. Explains credit-default swaps pretty well. Not sure I totally buy the idea that conservativism & liberality are primarily personality traits rather than political traits. The art is very evocative.

Reading this the 4th volume of Kick-ass made me wonder if there are similarities to Duterte's Philippines. Violence between vigilantes, mobsters, and crooked cops provide cover for each others' vendettas, leading to all kinds of murders and massacres. Reading this book I just realized one of the things I find so disturbing about Hit-Girl is how dead-eyed she is while she scythes down all her enemies. Now for the spoilers. I also liked Kick-Ass's efforts to go back to being normal... though I wished he chose a career closer to Valerie's career at the end. Finally, when Dave was blowing off the superherodom to be with Valerie, how were either of them also holding down normie jobs? I'd been thinking I would not keep reading the series after vol. 4.... but now I'm reconsidering. I'm a sucker for a series.

Story of the author's family history, focusing on his grandparents' lives in their native countries of Egypt and Tunisia, and how it was they ended up in Los Angeles. Contextualizes their lives in the history of the middle east & North Africa. Contains a great many personal stories and details about daily life in early to mid-20th century Tunis & Alexandria. Focuses on Jewish Arabic culture and its long history. A main idea of this book is that many of the religious divisions of the Arab world were created as part of divide & rule strategies by European colonial powers, including the Zionist movement. Makes me want to read further about Ottoman & pre-colonial era North Africa.

Memoir about the author's distant dad, and his childhood celebrity at the dawn of the game show age. Includes a damaging stage parent, a hidden past, emotionally distant childhood relationships. The part about how routinely early game shows were rigged makes me wonder a little bit about modern game shows (but not too much; they wouldn't do me like that!). Also makes me wonder if there's a connection between a lifetime of emotional repression and dementia; the book does not speculate. I really liked the art, especially the author's depiction of himself as a person in perpetual surreal shock.