Chicago: A Comix Memoir

Head’s swirling, bug-eyed style channels the freakish and frantic energy of underground comix with such fidelity that every page feels thick with smoke and adventurous grandiosity. His story, about being a 19-year-old virgin from New Jersey in the late 1970s who splits from his first year of art school in Ohio to bum around the skeeviest parts of Chicago, abandons the twee introspection of many modern autobiographical comics. Not exactly a thoughtful soul misunderstood by the world, this Glenn is so intently self-centered and gleefully slack that he doesn’t realize how close he’s come to hitting bottom until he’s there. After meeting his hero R. Crumb and reconsidering his own chosen vocation as a street bum, Glenn realizes that posing is easier than doing. However, an ill-advised romantic obsession with a risk-taking young woman his age from back home stands as a lodestar for Glenn but makes little impact on the reader. Still, Head’s memoir conjures the rebel spirit of the comix underground with ease and dissects the soul of creative ennui with straight-no-chaser honesty. (Sept.)