My (Current) Favorite Artist

 Liana Finck is a brilliant writer and illustrator with a journey story.

She "follows the fairytale." She goes off to live in a castle ("Apartment 5B") and has a child who teaches her to embrace "fish sticks, playgrounds, other customs of the kingdom." But she soon finds herself doing battle with her spouse.

The spouse never leaves work early when the school nurse calls. The spouse seems helpless in the kitchen, and he allows an open carton of eggs to rot on the dining room floor.

Liana has a standard approach to a problem, which is to name it, point it out, let the air out if its tires. When she found herself playing hostage to her own social anxiety, she began announcing, "I have social anxiety." She started to laugh about it. And the social anxiety went away. But this approach doesn't work in marriage. Liana repeatedly notes herself shouting, "You are what is wrong with the world! You are a symbol of the patriarchy!" And--instead of correcting his behavior--the spouse just scratches his head.

So Liana makes a switch. She chooses not to see her spouse as an oppressor, but instead as a struggling child. She imagines that she is lost and groping in the dark--and her spouse is in the same position. Things become less adversarial. Life is still chaotic, but our protagonist is no longer (constantly) bubbling with rage.

Finck has an extraordinary gift for rendering a complex idea in just one or two words. I'm sharing one moving example here. Also, Finck finds a couple of details that perfectly represent a character. Note the husband's baseball cap and posture; see the emotion in all of those curved lines. I'm obsessed.