Customer Reviews

King-Cat Classix

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King Cat Classix is a "selected works" of John P's past ten years' of work, and it is a hefty book! I couldn't wait for it to come out and read other reviewers, but now I'm honored to be the first. This tome is full of comics ranging from dreams, childhood memories, Zen parables, elegies to his dog Sam, animals.... a collection of mini-memoirs that add up the life of an ordinary working class man brought up in the midwest and is now in Colorado. I called his previous book, Mosquito Abatement Man, a bizarre slice of midwestern life, but the Classix is a gentler work, thoughtful, inquisitive and passionate about the woods, mountains, lakes. His earlier work is rendered in scrawling, cruder line, but full of energy and rage, and his later work calms to minimalism and simple elegance.

Reading Porcellino, you truly get a feeling you know the man. Or better yet, you ARE the man, working through daily life, writing Top-40 lists, watching autumn leaves fall--getting totally drunk. The intimacy to his work is a rare and exceptional thing. There are shades of Harvey Pekar here, but also the Beats, Hemingway, the early modern greats of American lit. The Classix is such an expansive book that you can dip in at any point and read a lyric about winter, or about adolescent Porcellino experiencing the first anxieties about girls. Yet everything is done with sincerity, honesty and a painful sort of clarity. Real life doesn't get realer.

Picked up this book because I like how brutally honest comix can be. This is no exception. Porcellino's minimalist drawings really convey a touching story.

Included in here is the entire all-Sam issue, which he created to pay tribute to his childhood yellow lab. If you can read that section without crying, you're tougher than I am--what a touching tribute.

Porcellino comes from a Do It Yourself generation. It's no wonder he was inspired by the Minutemen, as another title for this could have been "This Book Could Be Your Life." There are a lot of memories packed into this book.