Perfect Example - Softcover

John Porcellino

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1896597750 ISBN 13: 9781896597751

Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly, 2005

Synopsis

A melancholic memoir of saying goodbye to the familiar Road trips, drunken concerts, and late-night make-out sessions all swirl together in this coming-of-age graphic novel by King Cat cartoonist John Porcellino. Tackling the pain and uncertainty of the pivotal summer before college, Porcellino's sad and beautiful story is drawn in his sincere, minimalist style. Deceptively and charmingly simple, Perfect Example is a collection of Porcellino's self-published King Cat comics, which have won over thousands of readers with their honesty, empathy, and sincerity.

About this title

About the Author

An Utne Independent Press and Firecracker Award nominee, John Porcellino has self-published his comic-zine King Cat for more than fifteen years, an excerpt of which is included in McSweeney's Issue 13, edited by Chris Ware.

From the Inside Flap

Praise for author John Porcellino:

"John Porcellino's comics distill, in just a few lines and words, the feeling of simply being alive." --Chris Ware, author/cartoonist of Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Boy on Earth

"John Porcellino creates some of the most thoughtful, intelligent, sympathetic and, yes, beautiful comix in America." --Time.com

"Beyond his appealingly simple cartooning style, what really makes Porcellino's work endure is the sensibility that underlies all of his comics. Porcellino's take on himself and the world around him is passionate, gentle, and accepting, while not without moments of doubt, despair, and self-hatred." --The Comics Journal

Reviews

Porcellino, the longtime and, one imagines, long-suffering publisher of the zine King-Cat Comics and Stories, has come out with an autobiography covering his final days of high school and the following summer in Hoffman Estates, a Chicago suburb. Porcellino has a deliberately simple style of drawing. His childish images are emotional almost without effort. It's 1986, and Porcellino is a severely depressed teen who doesn't know what to do with his life. He hangs out with friends, chases two girls, goes out to the lake and finally falls into suicidal thoughts: the world feels bland and dead. The story suffers when Porcellino abandons the sweet, meandering plot to discuss his state of mind. These interior episodes feel tacked on: "I was a little boy. Now I'm grown. People—places... things come and go. But they're no more real than shadows on a wall." With the work of Dan Clowes, Harvey Pekar and French artist David B., the graphic novel is proving to be an excellent venue for describing the 20th-century everyman. Porcellino's work is a minor, flawed but still worthy example of this rising genre. (Oct.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1896597750
• ISBN 13: 9781896597751
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144