A Great Comic for the Dog Days of Summer- King-Cat Comics & Stories #83 by John Porcellino
Cartooning as a worldview, as therapy, as confession, and as autobio.
John Porcellino’s King-Cat Comics and Stories #83 isn’t making some kind of big and bold statement. This isn’t some kind of grand manifesto about life; that’s not what King-Cat is about. Porcellino’s comics are less stories and more like journal entries, capturing a brief flicker of time that means something to Porcellino. It could be recalling some suburban woods that he walked through when he was a kid, the common elements of a tire shop (his one-pager on this instantly bringing up the sense-memory of the smell of new tires,) or even a remembrance of a recently passed but much-loved dog, Porcellino uses comics as memory. Reading his stories is to experience his life through his memories, the good ones, and the bad ones. This is him holding onto these happy and painful experiences and we get to share those memories as well, finding direct and indirect connections to our memories.
Through his regular sharing of the letters he’s received and his Top 40 lists, a highlight of every issue, we get to witness these direct connections. Whether it’s other people who grew up in Chicago’s western suburbs sharing their recollections of the Schaumburg area 7-11s (I was a south-side kid and we just had White Hens where I grew up) or him calling Noah Van Sciver’s Joseph Smith and the Mormons a “true comix masterpiece,” there’s hopefully these experiences are our experiences or he’s reading the same stuff as we are. For this south-side kid, two pieces in this comic take me back to my childhood— “The Little Red Schoolhouse” and “Demolition Derby.” Both of these stories recall places that were practically rites of passage for a generation of suburban Chicago kids. In both of these pieces, Porcellino revisits specific places of his childhood. While his memories are of specific times and places, his recollections of the sights, smells, and sensations are much broader and more universal.
Porcellino walks this line between specificity and generalities in this comic. He draws some very specific comics about growing up in the Chicagoland area but he also has strips, practically visual poems, that are about sensations and brief instances of time. The initial one-pager in this issue is a memory from over 10 years ago, a low point in Porcellino’s life. Instead of giving some grand exposition of his emotions and experiences, it’s impressionistic storytelling, something Porcellino excels in. Whether it’s the sinking feeling of being alone, the small pleasures of being a cartoonist, or a memory of Highlight magazine, Porcellino can relate so much to and with his audience in the most economical and poetic ways.
By sharing these memories, Porcellino gives us these communal experiences. They trigger and unlock something in our memories. It’s the way that he helps us (or at least, me) to connect with these things, the shared and unshared recollections of our lives. It’s almost like a game of association; he says something and we react to it with our own complementary or contradictory experiences. On a specific level, he talks about family trips to an old dirt race course out in Willow Springs, IL, and it brings up my memories of summer nights spent out at that same race course watching races and demolition derbies there. I haven’t thought about this place in years but it’s now been on my mind quite a bit lately, the memories of being overpowered and overjoyed by all of these cars. That’s a very specific memory that Porcellino has drawn out of me and hopefully, you have your own experience that this comic helps you recall.
All of these stories, the quick impressionistic hits as well as the longer exploratory pieces offer glimpses into Porcellino’s life and his thoughts. The letters he receives and the top 40 lists just add to this menagerie of thoughts and impressions of a life. Through these two different modes of storytelling, he finds a rhythm and a balance in all of these different expressions of just what goes in John Porcellino’s mind. The spontaneity of King-Cat #83 gives his stories a unique shape in that each story almost gets to be shapeless on its own but then all comes together under the King-Cat banner to be some kind of updated statement about Porcellino’s headspace since the last issue of his comic.
In King-Cat comics, we see a way of using storytelling to process life. It’s practically cartooning as a worldview, as therapy, as confession, and as autobio. He brings it all together and distills it down to a way where you, for the time you’re reading his comic, get to see the world as John Porcellino sees it. King-Cat Comics & Stories #83 is our semi-regular dose of John Porcellino’s thoughts and musings, a welcomed chance to step outside of our own lives for a bit and connect with something and someone else.
