Filling the void left when James Kochalka ended his brilliant daily diary strip American Elf is Liz Prince with Look Back and Laugh. The book collects all of her daily comics from 2016, originally available only to her patrons on Patreon – and it’s really good!
I don’t know what it is about diary strips but they’re defo my jam. Maybe it’s the conciseness with which the artist has to highlight a moment in their day – like a comics haiku - or the variety of the strips or both. And, lordy, did Liz Prince have a varied 2016!
She marries her boyfriend Kyle, they buy a house in Maine, she travels to Macedonia to teach a comics class, her grandmother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and put in a home, she attends a comics con – and those are just the noteworthy events! Along the way are many, many strips on her wuvable cats Dracula and Wolfman and their fraught relationship, lots of naps, Indian food, movies, and, always, comics, comics, comics!
It speaks to Prince’s talent that the book never reads repetitively despite a lot of the same stuff coming up over and over. And, actually, I preferred a lot of the strips where she doesn’t do anything but talks frankly to the reader about her state of mind or breaks the fourth wall by revealing what’s going on behind-the-scenes.
I probably wouldn’t get along with Prince in real life – a librarian tells her friend where Prince’s book Tomboy is located, to which Liz unironically replies “… Did you just get… gender profiled?”; ugh. And she genuinely loved Ghostbusters 2016 – double ugh! Not all of the strips were that good – I wasn’t interested in the ones on recipes and fixing up her new home.
Still, the material is by and large very enjoyable regardless - Look Back and Laugh is a great read!
I don’t know what it is about diary strips but they’re defo my jam. Maybe it’s the conciseness with which the artist has to highlight a moment in their day – like a comics haiku - or the variety of the strips or both. And, lordy, did Liz Prince have a varied 2016!
She marries her boyfriend Kyle, they buy a house in Maine, she travels to Macedonia to teach a comics class, her grandmother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and put in a home, she attends a comics con – and those are just the noteworthy events! Along the way are many, many strips on her wuvable cats Dracula and Wolfman and their fraught relationship, lots of naps, Indian food, movies, and, always, comics, comics, comics!
It speaks to Prince’s talent that the book never reads repetitively despite a lot of the same stuff coming up over and over. And, actually, I preferred a lot of the strips where she doesn’t do anything but talks frankly to the reader about her state of mind or breaks the fourth wall by revealing what’s going on behind-the-scenes.
I probably wouldn’t get along with Prince in real life – a librarian tells her friend where Prince’s book Tomboy is located, to which Liz unironically replies “… Did you just get… gender profiled?”; ugh. And she genuinely loved Ghostbusters 2016 – double ugh! Not all of the strips were that good – I wasn’t interested in the ones on recipes and fixing up her new home.
Still, the material is by and large very enjoyable regardless - Look Back and Laugh is a great read!
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