Caroline Cash's gay, modern take on the '60s underground comic continues! Discover the bloody dread of paying your freelancer taxes for the first time. Feel the surreal peace of waking up after your world has ended. Bond over the possibility of puking in the bar icebox.
Features a cardstock foil cover and full-color comics!
Caroline Cash is an American cartoonist based in Chicago. She specialises in zines, prints and underground comics and she is best known for her autobiographical comic book Pee Pee Poo Poo, winner of the 2024 Eisner Award for best limited series.
Caroline Cash follows up her previous anthology comic with another great set of stories revolving around a Gen Z perspective on topics like dating, same sex relationships, and general adulting. I liked stories like "The Walk", a story that features Caroline's aimless wandering and drifting thoughts as she interacts with various people on the street. It seems like a clear homage to the Dan Clowes story, "The Stroll" from Eightball #3, which takes a look in the musings of a cynical Gen X'er who wanders the streets.
There's also an extended bit that re-imagines doing taxes as a bloodbath - a very apt description for anyone filing their own taxes for the first time (or indeed for the 12th time as is the case for me). Growing up always means different things for people from different generations, and I like Caroline's light mocking take on these kinds of topics.
Her cartooning remains ever sharp throughout this volume. Perhaps I found it a little less varied in styles as the previous issue of Peepee Poopoo, but the style she hones in on here is very refine and expressive. As a sampler for a cartoonist with only more room to grow, this is a solid collection of short comics.
I've read other issues in this series by Caroline Cash, Peepee Poopoo, that I am sure you will be disappointed to find has no peepee poopoo in it. Or maybe it does, I forget. It sure has vomit in it, from excessive drinking. A series of cartoons and short comics reflections written, the (great) cover says,"for girls and gays." So, since I am neither of the indicated target audiences, consider the source, but I liked this a lot.
Cash is a really good cartoonist with lots of potential. This series seems to be (in part?) a kind of queer homage to sixties alt-comix, as the cover reference to Daniel Clowes's Eightball makes clear. She's funny, snarky, insightful, and she writes of a kinda sideways twenty-something life in Chicago. I read her Girl in the World and used it in one of my comics classes and everyone dug it. I think when she finds some subject/story to create in greater depth, maybe in long form fashion, it will be great. I'm a fan.
3.5 stars There’s notably more (and smaller) stories in this issue than the three bigger stories in the previous issue 69, and the end effect for me is more of an autobio mosaic of aimless early adulthood malaise. That’s not necessarily a criticism, and it’s great at portraying broader 20something experiences through the very specific POV of a queer punk in Chicago, bouncing between being bored smoking pot at apartments and talking shit with friends at a dive bar. I found it an interesting slice of life, even if it also made me glad I’m not a 20something punk trying to scrounge out life in one of the most expensive cities in the US.
Caroline Cash shows promise as a cartoonist, but this collection wasn't super impactful. Pastiching old alt-comix would be more effective/subversive if there was an effort to comment on or transcend the source material... instead, this comic just replicates the most banal aspects of those comix (maybe that's the comment?). Aloofness pervades this comic, and I know Cash can give us a little more oomph.
Solid 4. A collection of true alt-comix where you can both feel and appreciate the DIY approach (that sentence sounded like word salad, but it was really a compliment and an attempt to hide the fact that I'm probably not cool enough to be reading stuff like this, let alone talk about it).
such a fun little anthology, very fun graphics! read this in one gulp @ bar on thurs night and had a good laugh. bookshop worker at unnameable books on vanderbilt is a huge fan or the author! rightfully so!
Rampant, undomesticated life as a queer chick in Chicago looking like it was drawn in one take. Short but lush; free-wheeling art in comic form. Did I mention it’s awesome? It is.
PeePee PooPoo is fantastic and Caroline Cash is one of the most brilliant cartoonists around. If you're thinking about checking this out, do yourself a solid and check it out.