Life Between Panels

April 16, 2018
Young (Nanjing: The Burning City) collects his long-running, angsty semiautobiographical webcomic detailing the life of a 20-something cartoonist living in New York City. Having dropped out of art school, he lives with his family and fifteen cats, a result of a shared fostering situation with his ex-girlfriend that’s gone awry. The relatable day-to-day story covers dating woes, roommate problems, difficult family dynamics, and professional challenges. Young explains in the foreword that he chose to publish this volume of a decade’s worth of work without making any revisions, despite its unevenness. One subplot, which involves imagined comic book characters like Crusader Cat living in parallel to Young’s own life, devolves awkwardly into magical realism, with cluttered layouts and heavy-handed writing. As the volume progresses, Young settles into a cleaner grid structure. His maturation over time is also apparent in how he draws his own character and those of his family, which in the first half of the book appear as elongated, angular figures with “westernized” features, but later with more distinctly Asian features. What Young communicates most successfully is that cultivating one’s world through relationships, caretaking, and craft requires patience, empathy, and introspection. Memoir readers who appreciate the immediacy that comics bring and those who have the collector’s instinct to own the complete arc will want to pick this up.

September 1, 2018

In this omnibus of Young's self-published webcomics, a semiautobiographical homage to his terrible 20s, aspiring cartoonist Ethan has recently dropped out of art school and is living with his tyrannical father and his well-meaning but overbearing mother, who has multiple sclerosis, in their Upper East Side apartment. He's also fostering 11 cats. Things get even worse when he's dumped by his high school sweetheart and fired from the Humane Society. Soul-sucking freelance gigs tear him away from his true passion: drawing comics about a superhero called Crusader Cat. As Ethan strays further from his creative passions, the world of Catropolis devolves into a postapocalyptic nightmare. Young blurs the lines between real life and fiction as Ethan enters Catropolis to become the hero of his own story. He must find integrity in his art, conquer self-doubt, and fix his increasingly strained relationships. Young's dynamic illustrations are heavily influenced by superhero comics-Ethan imagines himself "hulking out" at his boss and kicking a parking meter that has the face of his ex's new beau. Though the action sequences are entertaining, the moments of introspection are even more effective. VERDICT While there is some mature language and alcohol use, teens, particularly those interested in the arts, will enjoy this touching depiction of the painful, awkward, but ultimately enlightening journey of young adulthood.-Anna Murphy, Berkeley Carroll School, Brooklyn

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.