She’s great at watching people and has a knack for seizing on the slippery moment just before the mood turns from strange and funny to sad ... The fantastical elements of A Bintel Brief are constrained by the structure of the letters, but in her new graphic memoir, Passing for Human, Finck goes for broke. Shadows come to life, fear and writer’s block manifest as mean rodents that repeatedly force her to rip her work up and start over ... Imaginary friends are hard to pull off, imaginary boyfriends even more so, but Passing for Human has a light touch. Finck’s illustrations are spare, jumpy, and often very funny, and the magical realism never feels forced.
You know when you have a book report due but you’re not sure you completely understood the nuances of the book ... That’s exactly what happened to me with Liana Finck’s graphic memoir Passing for Human. Except that the self-doubt ended up being an entirely fitting emotion for confronting this book ... I read it again ... It is drawn in a straightforward pen-and-ink style but each simple drawing captures such raw emotion. It’s wonderfully intimate, like reading someone’s diary ... It’s all so poignantly relatable that it makes me a little achy.
...[a] tender, complicated narrative ... If reading it makes you think long and hard about neurological difference and the isolation it may involve, it also reminds you that we all feel weird at times – as if we are, as she puts it, only passing for human ... This book comes with a lot of whimsy: shadows that walk and talk; a god that is a queen on a cloud ... Her biblical-mythological interludes don’t always work. Somehow, though, this doesn’t matter – and not only because it’s impossible not to admire both her ambition and the beautiful economy of her line drawings ... There is a resonant truth at the heart of this book, and it soars above everything else.
...a compelling weaving of stories ... The words are brilliant, but the art is oddly unsatisfying, which is surprising since so much of this graphic memoir is about drawing and the creative process ... The pacing, the visual narrative are all strong despite the weakness of the actual line, which shows how powerful the work is and how much more powerful it could have been ... Finck has written a fascinatingly deep look into our shadow selves, into what makes us complete, what defines us ... The metaphor of the shadow self, part soul, part gut instinct, part core self, is beautifully evoked in each person's story. The pages with the shadows are also some of the best rendered. Still, there is an unsettling lack of definition to all the faces in the book ... some readers may be fine with the scribbly minimalism of Passing for Human. But it is also a missed opportunity for visual richness.
One of the things I like best about Liana Finck is her ability to not only be the only thing like her in comics but to communicate that fact clearly and with charm. Seldom are her cartoons transcriptions of actions — this happened then this happened then this happened — but rather the live unpacking of the actions ... Plus she's funny ... That humor is very much on display in Passing For Human in all its sly beauty, finishing a rounded perspective on the idea of humans and shadows as co-dependent beings ... She mixes this up with Biblical stories filtered through her own sensibility and with telling tweaks to them that bring them alive in the world as the malleable and powerful myths they should be, that align themselves with the personal details of her biography ... There’s an aspect to it that any of us could adopt it as their own even though it is so particular to Finck’s story and creative practice, and even though Finck’s art style is one that exudes a personal quality that makes it feel as though we’ve blundered upon someone’s private texts and we’re not supposed to be looking at this ... You can read hundreds of graphic novels and not find a single one that approaches self the way Finck does here and that’s what makes her work so special.
Finck’s line in Passing for Human is so fine and delicate it seems as if it will unravel altogether, like the thread of a previous night’s dream. Her story is also unconventional: It often stops and restarts, drifting into and out of interludes ... Between prologue and epilogue appears a series of first chapters. And yet it all holds together so well that any other telling is unimaginable ... Passing for Human has such a reeflike structure: Finck has succeeded in creating her own twilight zone, a land the artist herself seems to inhabit, a place of both substance and shadow.
Finck infuses her storytelling with so much genre-bending invention, it's not clear whether Passing as Human is a graphic memoir at all ... Lynda Barry paved this path almost two decades ago when she playfully coined the term 'autobiofictionalography' to describe her own almost-memoirs. Also, like Barry, Finck longs to 'draw the way I did as a kid,' which is perhaps why her style is so aggressively rough, with figures defined by only the barest, black lines, faces and anatomy evoked more than fully sketched. Even when she draws shadows, either as characters or as actual darkness, she highlights the haphazard patterns of her penwork. Even in her black and white world, nothing is simply and solidly black. The artwork is a comic in the cartoonish sense of simplified and exaggerated illustrations warping and arranging autobiographical material freely. But where Barry's equally dominant words seem factual, Finck's divisions are less clear. Yes, the visual content is inevitably warping, is inevitably from a point of view in both a literal and psychological sense. But the fantastical elements aren't limited to the visuals ... I can't say whether Liana or Leola Finck finds that ever-lost something-or-other through the fictional sketches of their mostly-true memoir. But I can say it's a pleasure to be invited on the journey.
Liana Finck draws like someone who has spent a great deal of time unlearning how to draw ... There is a great deal packed into these surprisingly dense pages. Reading the book I found a number of instances where Finck’s description of her family’s idiosyncratic understand of their inherited neuroatypicality rang true with my own experiences ... Learned primitivism notwithstanding, Finck remains a very readable artist ... Passing for Human gains much power from the rhythm of recurring themes and figures. The structurally ambitious framing narrative of Finck’s own attempt to tell her family’s story give the book the momentum of an orange being slowly peeled apart, skin by slice by seed. Finck’s secret weapon is her confident pacing.
For her imaginative coming-of-age memoir, graphic novelist and New Yorker cartoonist Finck has changed some names, including her own. Starting anew, with a brand-new title page several times throughout the book, 'Leola' wonders what story to tell and how best to tell it. Early on, she introduces the concept of her shadow, a companion who guided her before disappearing when she was a preteen. Should she begin with her mother, who taught her daughter the benefits of shadow-companionship, or her father, who passed his unique weirdness directly on to her? ... A sure hit for readers of graphic memoirs, this explores feeling different while recognizing sameness in others and making art while embracing being a work-in-progress oneself.
...Leola wears her oddity like a ball and chain. She shies away from other children and finds herself exiled from classroom hierarchies...But as she discovers, being different doesn’t just drive you away from others—it can lead you to authenticity, as well. Finck intertwines her jittery, dense line work with fairy tale whimsy...Though a lesser artist might have leaned on such magical realism as a crutch, Finck’s whimsy acts as a microscope to better understand family, romance, and isolation. This story is as tender as it is wry, depicting, for instance, despair with goofy drawings of robots and princesses.
This multilayered narrative might best be categorized as a 'meta-memoir,' a memoir about the writing of this memoir. New Yorker cartoonist Finck struggles to achieve cohesion and coherence within a story that remains something of a muddle for her. The artist within the narrative dubs this 'a neurological coming-of-age story,' as she attempts to account for her lifelong feelings of 'otherness' or 'weirdness' and writes of losing her own shadow, which gave her some perspective on her life and some meaning to it ... In its ambition, framing, and multiple layers, this raises the bar for graphic narrative. Even fans of her work in the New Yorker will be blindsided by this outstanding book.
