San Francisco Weekly on The Contradictions and I Want You

The Contradictions by Sophie Yanow

Bay Area artist Sophie Yanow turns her Eisner Award-winning webcomic, The Contradictions, into a graphic memoir. Dubbed a “masterpiece” by Fun Home author Alison Bechdel, The Contradictions follows Yanow in her college days, when she meets a self-described anarchist while studying abroad in Paris. It’s exciting to Sophie, whose parents were “adventurous lefties,” quite contrary to her own risk-averse nature. For spring break, the two hitchhike across Europe, attempt shoplifting and squatting, and do mushrooms while trying to avoid spiraling into existential questions. Exploring Europe and living without restrictions might sound glamorous, but The Contradictions is aptly named, humorously examining the ways reality doesn’t always live up to your expectations. Yanow’s book — with its neatly organized six-panel pages, observant narrator, and simple black-and-white illustrations — is surprisingly calm for all the wild events that happen, but that’s probably the point. Across all the adventures, Sophie’s doing her best to find herself. And eventually, she’ll find her way to a place where she can call home.

I Want You by Lisa Hanawalt

Before Lisa Hanawalt was designing Bojack Horseman, she was a student at Gunn High School in Palo Alto with show creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg. I Want You is a collection of Hanwalt’s earlier work from her 20s, well before the Netflix series brought her iconic style to animated life in one of the most devastating shows of the past decade. In I Want You, Hanawalt first reflects on what it feels like to look back at her earlier work, which carries her signature style of fantastic “gross” aesthetics and a fascination with the untrimmed, unpolished human (or animal) body. (“It feels like taking a shit and not flushing it,” she writes.) In these pages, baby birds spill out of a horse’s eye sockets, sex bugs (which you might have seen on Tuca and Bertie) splash around on a lube-drenched keyboard, and worms crawl out from bruised fruit. Hanawalt is a master of excess, and her early work is a marvel.