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Readers know how I feel about Lynda Barry. An interview of the lady herself at The Rumpus by Anne Elizabeth Moore: "It doesn’t matter what their days were like before, their lives. Lynda Barry is in the room with them now so everything from this moment on will be amazing."

From Barry: "The one thing I can say about images and work with images, if I can put their function into one sentence: it’s the thing that gives you the feeling that life is worth living. Which is step one, I’m not saying it’s really worth living or it’s fantastic. I’m saying it’s also the thing that will keep you from killing yourself and others. So it’s a public service, I think [laughter], to engage in images."

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This weekend I got an tour of East Coast former-Pennsylvania Railroad stations via an unexpected trip to Charm City. Philadelphia's 30th Street Station is my one and only love, but I also got to see Frank Furness's little brick Wilmington station (twice) and spend an anticlimactic hour and a half in Baltimore's beautiful Penn Station. 

B and I relaxed into acceptance by the time the train back North arrived and on the way back we sat across from some drunken New Yorkers. We talked about Sodastream and running. Well, they talked about running. The lady half of the couple already googled me and found this blog, which proves she is much better at drinking than I.

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Saveur magazine is making the world a better place by asking amazing comics folks to make one of favorite things: recipe comics. The most recent one is from Corrine Mucha and includes "choi butts." 

Photo from Saveur 

Other contributors include Dorothy Gambrell, Jillian Tamaki and Anthony Clark. And it is a great place to see work from criminally under-read Laura Park.

Ghost Comics: A Benefit Anthology for RS Eden, edited by Ed Choy Moorman

Ghost Comics grabbed me for three reasons: it is full of artists I love like Corinne Mucha, Lucy Knisley and Maris Wicks, its topic is close to my heart and it was only ten bucks. The B&W collection, put together by contributor Ed Choy Moorman, covers ghostly ground in a myriad of ways, and with the exception of uninspiring one-pagers, none of the contributors took the easy way out. I appreciated the variance of tone in the stories; it kept the book readable for one sitting. In fact, there were so many standouts that, before this review, my copy looked like it grew little, yellow post-it feathers.

“Dear Dave,” Ed Choy Moorman’s tale of growing up probes both the anger and sadness of losing a formerly idolized family member to drugs. Toby Jones’ auto-bio take on becoming invisible in a relationship in a time of grief, “I Can’t Deal,” strikes the balance between funny and thought provoking. In “The Point” Alison Cole’s signature yeti-looking character finds a way to deal with the ghosts that plague her day—a nice meditation piece for the haunted! Jenny Tondera’s piece uses a single hazy image that gets progressively whiter over the single-sentence story to look at anger associated with certain memories. Monica Anderson’s gut-wrenching tale of abuse and neglect shows the legacy that that kind of treatment leaves behind, using only drawn lettering to tell the story, which makes the piece feel immediate, like she is speaking right into your ear. “This is a Ghost,” by Warren Craighead III is a fun, good lookin’ pencil exploration of the titluar subject in diagram form.

I really enjoyed this book. Since, as the subtitle says, part of the price of the book goes to support, RS Eden, a drug rehabilitation program in Minnesota, your purchase will be doing double duty.

Exclusive: blogger dies from lack of comments!

Bug girl, always a fount of information, has alerted me to the fact that many issues of the World Weekly News are now online through Google Books. Paging through the issues sends me to a few places in my past: collaging, zines, and the simple delight my brother found in buying those things at the supermarket. I am not sure exactly what he loved about them, but for me the benign absurdity was always a welcome distraction from more menacing ridiculousness.

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Friend of Try Harder, the amazing SEC is signing the new Mome at Bergen Street Comics on Sunday. See you there.

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Hooray! Robin talks with Corrine Mucha over at inkstuds. I love her work, and will review My Alaskan Summer soon soon soon.