John Porecellino, King-Cat Comics #65
Alternating in prose and comic form (plus a list and a map for good measure), Porcellino recounts memories from his past about his band's first out-of-state gig, a road trip to Kansas, working a job assembling picture frames, and more. Nothing particularly eventful happens in these stories. Interpretations are minimal, psychological inner workings implied at best, and ramifications unmentioned. The matter-of-fact presentation lends a hushed grace to each story's unique exercise in nostalgia – not for simpler, more innocent times, but simply for that one time. Self-contained and concentrated, yet unpolished and unremarkable, these slight narratives are mild joys in themselves, coming off the page with the intimacy, immediacy, and guileless ease of anecdotes exchanged between friends. But their genius – their miracle almost – lies in Porcellino's knack for incidentally conjuring the reader's own long-neglected stories, and for sparking fresh enthusiasm for the banal and not-so-banal details of the lives of the reader's own acquaintances. His wide-eyed embrace of life and of memories, bad as well as good, as an unending collection of fascinating and, sometimes, defining vignettes is irresistible and, best of all, infectious. I guess what I'm getting at is that this is memoir at its best.
This review appeared in the July-August 2006 issue of Punk Planet.