Hey LA, don’t miss Tommi Parrish at Skylight Books! They’ll be discussing their newest book, Men I Trust, with Ron Regé, Jr. (Halcyon) on January 31st at 7:00 pm.
About Men I Trust: Eliza is a thirtysomething struggling single mother and poet. Sasha, a twentysomething yearning for direction in life, just moved back in with her parents and dabbles as a sex worker. The two strike up an unlikely friendship that, as it veers toward something more, becomes a deeply resonant exploration of how far people are willing to go to find intimacy in a society that is increasingly not conducive to it.
In Sasha and Eliza, Parrish has created two of the most fully realized characters in recent contemporary fiction. Parrish’s gorgeously painted pages showcase a graceful understanding of body language and ear for dialogue, brilliantly using the medium of comics to depict the dissonance between the characters’ interior and exterior experiences. Men I Trust is about not-always-healthy people attempting to make healthy connections in a disconnected world, and is one of the most moving and insightful works of literary fiction in any medium this year.
About Halcyon: The sleeping figure on the cover hints at the dream logic that drives this visual feast of a graphic novel. It can’t all be explained, and it isn’t meant to be explained. Ron Regé, Jr. is one of the singular cartoonists of his generation, an unusual but skilled stylist and storyteller with an acutely passionate moral and idealistic core that stands out amongst his peers. Halcyon is a spiritual cousin to Regé’s 2012 graphic novel The Cartoon Utopia, which has garnered a following in new age and hermeneutic studies circles and in which higher beings try to communicate with us through art, music, and storytelling — a theme revisited here via the book’s central characters. Halcyon is the work of a cartoonist at the height of his powers, a superlative use of the form in the service of relating the author’s compassionate — and visually stunning — worldview.
