To Know Your Alive, Dakota McFadzean
2020
Some Can-Con comics, funded in part by the Canadian government!
McFadzean has been publishing comics for about a decade, and it's absolutely criminal that I have never seen his name mentioned on an American website. I'm sure it has, as he's been printed in some American magazines, but his three collections just don't get properly reviewed it seems.
I first saw his work through his daily comics on Tumblr. He spent a few years making daily strips, and you can see it in his inking and story-telling. He's put in the 10,000 hours already.
This is a collection of short stories from different publications, so there isn't a strong through line in them, except that he goes over a lot of the same themes. If I were to put a finger on his main topics, it would be existential horror and existential banality. I had three favorite stories in this. In one, a new kid at a school is bullied, but the kid is also rotten, so nobody is at fault and everybody is at fault. It's kids. In another, a woman gets a gig as a game tester and wonders what life she has. Another more surreal one has the world's first contact with an alien, and how boring it becomes a few weeks later when the next big news story breaks.
I kind of lean toward the existential banality ones, but he also has lots of stuff about faces melting off. He likes drawing faces coming off.
The art is really good, classical cartooning. In terms of modern artists, I can see Seth, Chester Brown, and Hartley Lin in his work. Clean, easy-to-read work. The only problem with this collection is that the works were originally formatted to different sizes, so the ones that were made to be printed on A3 paper are a little difficult to read compressed to the collection size. All the same, I think this is a phenomenal book, especially if you miss the Drawn and Quarterly and Fantagraphics books of the '90s.
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