Cartoon Girl

You couldn't ask for a cartoonist with a more singular combination of humorous observation and personal narrative (complemented by an equally singular graphic style) than Chicago-based comics artist, filmmaker and underground creative personality Heather ``cartoon girl'' McAdams. Like other 30-something slacker cartoonists, her works often exploit her own meandering life experiences, but she's managed to produce a very personal response to the discursive stream of everyday American popular/mainstream cultural flotsam. The book compiles the various graphic forms she's utilized: lists (``Everything I have is broken,'' and ``Where we store stuff in our brains''); loopy autobiographical stories (``The night I met Tom Waits'' and ` `Four in the Morning''); and eerily drawn, prosaically comic single-panel gags (``Like Mutha, Like Dotter,'' and ``Hows bout you and me going East for a while''). Whether she's drawing evil cats or embarrassing moments, the works all display both wit and formidable, though unusual, drawing skills. Her carefully rendered, faux callow, linear caricatures transform the drifting contradictions of life into striking and eccentrically funny pictures. (May)