When I was younger I’d walk with my eyes to the ground, searching for treasure. Though I’ve now given most of my found treasure away, I still have a few items in a folder that I keep for a zine that I’ll never make. I loved those items because they allowed me to escape into another life for a few moments, usually a weirder and sadder one that made me feel better about my teenage rage. I often imagined the circumstances in which such private papers were dropped but never took it further. J.T. Yost has done all of us collectors one better and spun poignant, fictional comics out of collections of found paper. In a way, the title says it all. These are modern day weepies and they are really, really good.
Issue #1 fo
llows several days in the life of a fuck up named Sean, conjured by a journal Yost found under a burned couch in 1996. From there he builds the story to its sad conclusion using hate-fuck rap lyrics written on the back of an envelope and an illiterate note about money and coke scrawled on a napkin. The decisions that Sean makes feel like inevitable steps towards doom. There are some people that just can’t be saved and Yost is showing us one of the many ways to go down. The reader is dropped into the story with only the journal entries to prepare us and the details that Yost uses, like domestic bliss signaled by sprouts-buying and the sheepish face of a thief found out, make the patchwork world real.
A little girl watching TV in a dark room—from her pigtails to her delight in juice, you just know she’s going to have her innocence shattered soon. That last drop of sweet juice is what opens issue #2, a story where single moments of loyalty, cruelty and misunderstanding build to a shattering conclusion for a woman who is just trying to get by.
Glad you liked the first two issues! I’m hard at work on the third (it’s a continuing story, in case you didn’t pick up on it). Thanks, Carrie!