So, if you’re a regular reader of my weekly West Week Ever: Pop Culture In Review posts, then you know that I’ve set a few reading goals for 2025. To keep myself accountable, I update my totals every week, and discuss some of the stuff I read that week. Well, I’m currently at the Outer Banks, and it’s New Comic Book Day, with nary a comic shop in sight (the last remaining one down here closed in the winter, allegedly over…tax…stuff…). I knew this before coming down, so I downloaded a bunch of stuff to my tablet, and I’ve been taking full advantage of the Libby and Hoopla apps. It’s only Wednesday, and I’ve already read 7 different graphics novels. I started to realize that waiting til Friday might result in a VERY long post that no one’s gonna read. I mean, we live in an age where no one has an attention span, and some of my closest friends swear they “skim” the post every week. So, yeah. If I’m gonna talk about all these books, I was gonna need a second post. Plus, I started to notice a trend with a lot of what I read: They dealt with Depression. Now, this wasn’t exactly intentional, as I just chose books I’d either heard folks raving about, or the little blurb sounded interesting on whatever app I found it on. Still, it’s 2025, and, to paraphrase Hulk Hogan, “I guess we’re all a little depressed.” Some of us more than others. So, that’s what we’re talking about today. Books about depression, written for – and by – folks suffering from it.
First up was It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth, described as “an auto-bio-graphic-novel”, by cartoonist Zoe Thorogood. Now, Thorogood’s was a name that I had learned just after Covid, though I couldn’t really put my finger on what she’d done. She had risen to fame through her webcomics, as well as her first book, The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott. More recently, she wrote the Image series Hack/Slash: Back To School, which was the latest installment in Tim Seeley’s long-running horror franchise. It’s Lonely…, however, is the release that put her on my radar, as the usual publications were raving about it. Basically, it’s a collections of thoughts and events that Thorogood experienced over a six-month period. I’m not entirely sure what Thorogood expected to happen during this span of time, but it begins just after she has gotten noticed by Image Comics, and is about to embark upon her first comic convention appearance.
I should probably point out that this six-month period begins in 2021, when the world has shut down due to Covid. So, her flight to the US (she’s a British creator) is canceled, and she instead throws herself into her work. Even though she doesn’t really cite it as a cause, the isolation of that pandemic starts to get to her, and she wrestles with depression and self doubt. We learn that she was basically always like this. Growing up, she was “the weird one”, which put distance between her and everyone else. Now, at 23, she doesn’t have many friends, and her relationship with her parents is strained. You know, typical Artist Shit™. So, what should have been an exciting period is actually somewhat mundane, punctuated by bouts of suicidal ideation. Oh, and it does this weird thing where the majority of the characters are basically anthropomorphic animals, who only appear human when needed. So, her only friend is a pigeon girl, whose actual face we never see. Not sure why she chose to do this, but I’m sure some readers felt it was “edgy”.
While Thorogood does a decent job conveying the magnitude of her depression, the fact there was no real “arc” here sort of hurt it. There’s a segment near the end, where she comes to America to spend some time with a male artist on whom she had a crush. They’d been talking online, and were set to meet at the convention appearance that ended up being canceled. So, when it is safe to travel, she makes the trip, which turns out to be one of the most awkward and uncomfortable experiences of her life. The guy (he’s a cat man) is still in love with his ex, and he tells Thorogood that it’s not her, it’s him (yet, she knows it’s her). So, she internalizes this, and takes it as more evidence that she’s “unlovable”. Still, the trip serves as something of a turning point. Before her flight out, she and the guy go to breakfast and hash it all out. He asks her “I’m going to be the bad guy in your book, aren’t I?”, and she pretty much confirms that he will be. The way the trip played out, though, left her without a real *ending* for the book, so she starts playing around with literary devices and tricks. It’s almost feels like a desperate attempt to fill pages, but you finish the book, and you hope for the best for her. I mean, there are several moments in the book, where established comic pros will approach her and tell her she’s “The Future of Comics”, which doesn’t do much to relieve her anxiety, but you assume she’ll one day fulfill that “prophecy”.
This was one of those situations, though, where it doesn’t behoove you to research the subject after reading the book. I think it’s pretty common these days: You watch the Netflix documentary, or the TLC reality show, and then you Google the folks to see if they’re still in jail or if they won that congressional seat. Well, I know some of y’all are gonna find me being “judgy” here, so here’s your disclaimer. It turns out Thorogood and the guy reconciled, and they’ve been together now for, like, two years. Now, I’m sure you want to say “Good for them!”, but he really sounded like Bad News. Sure, you could say that she wasn’t a Reliable Narrator, seeing as how, in that moment, he had hurt her. Still, she was 23, and he’s in his early 40s. I already don’t trust the emotional maturity of anyone under 25 (Call me when you can rent a car!), while this is a guy who had asked her “Wanna do acid and get pizza?” Yeah, I’m a square, but it just doesn’t seem like she actually learned anything from that six-month period, which sort of renders the book’s original ending to be moot?
Anyway, I wasn’t really a fan, but it probably wasn’t for me anyway. I like to think that I have these eclectic tastes, but this is one of those things that would have sold like gangbusters at the Small Press Expo, while I have an aversion to anything where comics might be referred to as “comix”. In the book, folks were coming up to Thorogood at cons, telling her how “relatable” her stuff was. While she sort of took offense to it, I guess it speaks to the fact that she’s addressing a demographic that ain’t me.
Next up, I read Everything Is OK, by cartoonist Debbie Tung. This is one that I randomly found on Libby, as I had finally figured out how to find “the good stuff” on that app, and I spent hours over the weekend just looking for stuff. Similar to Thorogood, Tung is a cartoonist who struggles with anxiety, and is starting to believe she might have depression. When the book starts, she has reduced her hours at her job so that she can dedicate more time to her freelance art career. As she starts juggling more tasks and more responsibilities, the uncertainly of her career choice swells up and results in a panic attack. She realizes she needs help, so she starts seeing a therapist, who helps her to reframe her thinking. A lot of her situations were more relatable, I felt, than Thorogood’s. She has career self doubt. She has self image issues. She has parents who don’t seem to support her. She’s not great at self care. Some days it’s almost impossible for her to get out of bed. So, the book is really following her as she analyzes her life with her therapist, and learns coping strategies so that she doesn’t end up drowning.
While the book is gorgeous, it’s formatted in a way where every page is basically an affirmation. It’s almost to the point where you could tear out a page, frame it, and put it on the wall of your therapy office. In fact, it feels like a gift book you’d find at the Hallmark store. Tung will say things like “I have to realize how fortunate I am, and that I don’t have to do these things, but rather I get to do them.” And this is the sort of sentiment where a little goes a long way. Yet, that becomes the entirety of the book. So, after a while, you’re like “Sure, the art’s nice, but we get it already. ‘When life gives you lemons, blah blah blah.” I didn’t dislike reading it, but it reminded me of when we all had to read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel at Cornell, which is a book that spends 480 pages finding new ways to repeat the same shit it told you in its introduction. If you don’t have time to read all that, allow me to spoil it for ya: The secret is LUCK. Yes, Diamond basically said that the Chinese created gunpowder, the Germs killed the Native Americans, and Steel changed the world, mainly, due to luck. It would be a whole different ballgame if some other cultures had ended up with that stuff, but, as luck would have it, they didn’t and here we are. 480 pages! So, this wasn’t nearly as bad, but we got the point way before the acknowledgements page.
I guess I’ve got something controversial and judgy to say about all these books today. You see, the protagonist is drawn as a sometimes-blonde white woman. The art is somewhat “cutesy”, so when she says that she hates her looks, you never know if it’s dysmorphia or if she actually has something going on, as she’s not drawn that way. However, as you may have noticed above, the creator’s last name is “Tung”. I thought that it might be by marriage or something, only to Google her and discover this is her:
So, that kind of reframes everything, as a lot of this could be viewed through a cultural lens that isn’t present. You almost wonder if she – or her publisher – decided to omit any of that in order to make the book more “universal”. Looking back at her interactions with her parents, there’s one scene where her mom tells her about her cousin’s new job, and how it’s well-paying, and right out of college! Every Asian family in every TV show and movie has this scene. “Why can’t you be more like your Cousin Jessica? She went to Harvard and she’s a doctor!” That’s not to say that other cultures don’t do this, but I remembered it seemed sort of tonally dissonant here, but I wrote it off as being a “British thing” (Tung, like Thorogood, is a British cartoonist). But you’re now left wondering if cultural pressure is also contributing to her anxiety, as maybe she doesn’t feel she’s living up to cultural expectations, as well as her own. She has completely omitted the role and influence of The Immigrant Experience™. It’s one thing to say “I’m anxious because I’m taking a big career risk, and I might fail, and it hurts that my parents don’t support me”, but it’s another thing to reframe that as “I’m anxious because my parents moved here to give me a better life, sometimes working multiple jobs, seven days a week, and here I am, trying to make a career out of telling my life stories as if they happened to a white woman.” Stings, don’t it?
Anyway, like Vanessa Williams, I went and saved the best for last for y’all today. The last book in this “series” was Why Don’t You Love Me?, by Paul B. Rainey. Again, I hadn’t heard of it prior to reading the blurb on Libby, and even that turned out to be misleading. What started out as something of a chore to read turned out to be an amazing reading experience, and I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s formatted like a collection of comic strips, where each page is a new “installment”. The strip follows Mark and Claire Hopkins, who are going through what appears to be a loveless marriage. They have two small kids, but Mark is so scatterbrained keeping things together that he never remembers the name of their son (Mark calls him “Tommy”, when his name is actually Charley). When the book starts, Mark is sort of puttering around the house, as he’s been on a leave of absence from work. Meanwhile, Claire is in DEEP depression, where she never gets out of her bathrobe, and she drinks and smokes all day. The kids rarely make it to school, because the parents are neglectful and simply forget their responsibilities. Claire has taken over the bedroom, forcing Mark to sleep on the living room couch every night. All of their meals are pizza delivery. I really don’t know how more to convey how miserable their lives are.
Notice I described it as a “comic strip”, but not a “comedic strip”. While there are moments of humor, in some of those “You have to laugh to keep from crying” scenarios, there isn’t much light at the end of the tunnel. When Mark gets fed up, he musters the courage to tell Claire he wants a divorce, and she responds by laughing in his face. Once his leave of absence runs out, Mark has to return to his job as a website manager, but he’s anxious because he doesn’t know how to do that job. He keeps telling Claire that he’s a barber, and doesn’t know the first thing about managing websites. Meanwhile, Claire gets bouts of energy, which she uses to stalk old boyfriends on Facebook. After a chance meeting with the father of one of her kid’s classmates, Claire begins an affair with him while Mark is at work. Mark starts to realize he’s actually good at his website manager job, while Claire’s life gets worse and worse. And then, one day, everything fades to white. We turn the page to discover a Mark who’s a lonely, single barber, and a Claire who’s a career girl in a long-term relationship with her boyfriend, Joe. As the story progresses, we learn that Mark and Claire both remember their time “over there”, in the life where they were married and had kids, but this reality was actually their home. So, Claire’s drunken depression was because she knew she didn’t belong there, but didn’t think she’d ever make it home. So, now that she’s back where things are familiar, she’s thriving…to a point. Meanwhile, Mark realizes his life was better in the other reality, as he had a career that challenged him, and a family (even if that family included a loveless marriage). Mark and Claire reunite in this reality, piecing together what happened, as well as what it means for their future. Can they get back to that reality, and have a second chance? Is that even what they both want?
I loved this book immensely, which surprised me because I almost quit it several times in the beginning. It’s very British, but also very cruel. It’s not even a playful banter between Mark and Claire half the time, but rather you knew he’d kill her if he thought it was worth the effort. You can’t even say he was staying around as some sort of “sense of duty”, as he didn’t love the kids enough to even try to remember their names. No, he stayed around out of fear of the unknown, and “Better the devil you know.” Meanwhile, Claire clearly cares nothing for Mark, and is looking for any sliver of a spark to make her feel alive. When the book starts, you think “Well, surely they loved each other at one time, so what happened?” That’s even Mark’s approach to the situation. Then, you learn that not only did they never love each other, you learn exactly why that is. It’s a fascinating story, with shades of a Charlie Kaufman influence. Described as a “dark, domestic sci-fi comedy”, it takes a while for the “sci-fi” to kick in, but when it does, hold on to ya butts! While the other two books might have served as self-help guides in a sense, this book really makes you think. It’s about lost opportunity, grieving the past, and being hopeful for the future. It’s about not knowing what you have until it’s gone, as well as what happens when you realize “you can’t go home again”. I highly recommend Why Don’t You Love Me?, and I’ll definitely be seeking out more of Rainey’s work. Those creators were throwing the prediction on Thorogood but, if ya ask me, Rainey is the true Future of Comics.
So, there ya have it – three graphic novels on depression. It was probably best to sequester them into their own little post, as I’ve got a whole “Summer of Superman” vibe for Friday’s Run The Numbers, and we don’t need these guys raining on that parade. In any case, let me know in the comments if you’ve read any of these, or if you’ve got some suggestions for stuff I should check out!
