An amusing book about nothing. It's like reading someone's diary. ( )

Lucky by Gabrielle Bell is a memoir set in three short comics. The time covered shows her attempts at living in New York and finding work.

New York hasn't been an easy place for outsiders to live in for a very long time. Moving into any super popular big city is fraught with problems — high rent, small apartments, over crowding, and few jobs for the amount of people trying to get them. It takes motivation, hard work, networking and good luck to get a foot in the door.

That motivation seems to be lacking here. Maybe instead there's depression but I'm not sure. The comics are mostly about her time moving from one crazy, over-crowded apartment to another and how much she hated each one. There's also a lot of moping and the sending of insulting cover letters.

It was amusing when I read it but I can't imagine wanting to re-read it. If this were fiction, I'd complain about the shallowness of the main character. But it's a memoir in a comic format. I'm really not sure how to respond to that. ( )

An autobiographical notebook about an artist struggling to make ends meet in New York, while suffering self-doubt about her own work and the various low paid jobs she works in. I found it a fascinating glimpse of the life of a working artist. Her jobs were all related to her work like space junk is to an astronaut: life model, artist's assistant, jewellery assembler, freelance illustrator, art tutor; none of them what she really wants to be doing. Meanwhile she struggles with her own projects, her sense of isolation, her various housemates and bedsits. Her boyfriend Tom and many of her friends are similarly working poor artists in NYC. Hers is an uncertain existence, but she has an eye for observing odd social situations with gentle humour. ( )

3.5/5.0

These strips are less developed than the ones collected in The Voyeurs, but they're still good. In these earlier comix, Bell hasn't quite honed her unique voice of ennui to the point where it's at today. Neither does she explore her anxiety and depression as much as she will in the future. The raw material is there, but the text is more factual, more mundane, with less of the deeper interiority that marks her later work. There are also only tiny hints of the playful magical realism she will indulge in later on. For new readers, this is a good place to start, but it does feel somewhat lacking if you have already read some of her later work. ( )

nothing new here. ( )