You Can't Get There From Here by Jason

Is there something about comics as a medium that encourages so many stories about loneliness and the (often futile) search for companionship? Is it something about cartoonists that they're drawn to tell these kinds of stories? Is there some kind of Harold Bloomian agonistic anxiety of influence working on them so that they're driven to revise and elaborate on Krazy Kat?

I'd answer a tentative "yes" to all of those questions, which came to me as I was reading through Jason's You Can't Get There From Here (although reading Robot Dreams by Sara Varon a few weeks ago probably started me thinking along these lines).

Some other things I like about this book:

-the matter-of-fact presentation

-the irony-free adoption of the Universal Frankenstein iconography

-sense of inevitability that builds up, moment-to-moment, panel-by-panel

-the lack of defensiveness or genre posturing

-relative rigorousness of formal choices

-the lack of exposition, backstory, explanations that keeps it from being "high concept".