Life Between Panels

April 16, 2018
Young (Nanjing: The Burning City) collects his long-running, angsty semiautobiographical webcomic detailing the life of a 20-something cartoonist living in New York City. Having dropped out of art school, he lives with his family and fifteen cats, a result of a shared fostering situation with his ex-girlfriend that’s gone awry. The relatable day-to-day story covers dating woes, roommate problems, difficult family dynamics, and professional challenges. Young explains in the foreword that he chose to publish this volume of a decade’s worth of work without making any revisions, despite its unevenness. One subplot, which involves imagined comic book characters like Crusader Cat living in parallel to Young’s own life, devolves awkwardly into magical realism, with cluttered layouts and heavy-handed writing. As the volume progresses, Young settles into a cleaner grid structure. His maturation over time is also apparent in how he draws his own character and those of his family, which in the first half of the book appear as elongated, angular figures with “westernized” features, but later with more distinctly Asian features. What Young communicates most successfully is that cultivating one’s world through relationships, caretaking, and craft requires patience, empathy, and introspection. Memoir readers who appreciate the immediacy that comics bring and those who have the collector’s instinct to own the complete arc will want to pick this up.