To Know You’re Alive

Dakota McFadzean is a Canadian comic strip writer and artist – he has two previous volumes of bundled shorts and his work has appeared in MAD Magazine, Funny or Die, The New Yorker and The Best American Comics.

To Know You’re Alive is a book of graphic short stories – ennui makes for existential horror in these weirdly wonderful shorts. Take the Richard Linklater movie SubUrbia, the Stephen King of Different Seasons and imagine a mix of those story-ideas re-written and sketched by Adrian Tomine – that’s the feeling I got, instantly, from McFadzean’s worlds here. He creates these amazing flat, monochrome worlds and uses that Daniel Clowes trick of changing the illustration-style to suit each story; sometimes sloppy, sometimes almost hyper-real.

Like Tomine, McFadzean knows that the true horror is in tired parents, kids raised almost alone by screens or left to wander streets; that the worst thing that can happen in some situations is utmost boredom, the fact that nothing actually happens is its own sinister, provocative jump-cut. A terror that strips the soul.

These stories hurt. They are cruel. They cut deep. But they are funny. And weird. And intriguing. They are bruised and beautiful. They are like nothing else. And then they are exactly like indie film scenes – just storyboarded, almost reverse-engineered.

I have a particular type of graphic novel that I love most. And this is it. I picked this up without knowing if it was in my wheelhouse, but at the same time – I knew. I just knew. This hit me like Clowes and Harvey Pekar and Adriane Tomine and some of the great R. Crumb stuff.

If you like dark, gritty realism mixed with a strange surrealism then you’ll want to check this book out too.
You can support Off The Tracks via PressPatron