Philippa perry

A podcast with real emotional heft: Philippa Perry’s Siblings in Session reviewed

Have you ever taken a piece of advice? I’m not asking a rhetorical question. Have you ever once in your life been given a piece of advice that you’ve then acted on? I ask this question a lot at parties, and generally find the answer is: ‘No, not that I can think of.’ It may be that when we take good advice, we begin to imagine we came up with the idea in the first place. It may be that we always just do whatever it is we were always going to do. All I can say for sure is that if you ask: ‘What’s the best piece of advice

The serious business of graphic novels

One of the running jokes about ‘serious’ graphic novels is that so many seem to consist, one way and another, of comics about how lonely, miserable and socially inept comic book creators are. Adrian Tomine leans into the trend, but with great charm, in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (Faber, £16.99). Here is an autobiographical anthology of humiliation in chronological order — a series of wan vignettes taking the artist from inadequate-feeling schoolboy comics nerd to… inadequate-feeling New Yorker-published middle-aged comics superstar. Every time he feels he’s arrived, there’s something to remind him he hasn’t: a stinking review; a disobliging comparison to Neil Gaiman or Dan Clowes; Frank Miller