Precious rubbish

Texas-born, Harvard-educated artist Kayla E.'s uniquely unconventional, hauntingly shocking debut graphic memoir is reminiscent of a complicated mosaic that's missing pieces but has been filled in with unexpected replacements to create a disturbing collage both horrific and beautiful. Surprising elements include a Three Little Pigs adaptation (with police); a word search puzzle with grievous vocabulary (dissociation, incest, rape); alarming paper dolls; "'gag' breaks" more nauseating than humorous; advertisements to hire a "Hitman 4 Her" or "Become a Witch"; even vegan recipes. By eschewing linear narrativity, what disjointedly emerges is the portrait of a stalwart survivor of incomprehensible family dysfunction. When her Mexican American father and white mother divorced, Kayla shuttled between both parents. Her brother was her sexual predator; her father excused his son's heinous behavior with "Your brother is in love with you," and her mother admitted she knew. Physical and emotional violence made both homes frighteningly unsafe. "Relying heavily on the fixed compositional structure and aesthetic codes of post-war American comics," Kayla's author's bio reveals, "she imposes order onto recollections once disorganized by intrafamilial abuse, addiction, and sexual violence." A stark stack of white-print words down an all-black final page--"PLEASE REMEMBER THEY NEVER LOVED YOU"--proves jarringly wrenching yet irrevocably freeing.

In this fierce and fabulous debut, book designer and indie cartoonist Kayla E. reconfigures the impersonal visual language of 20th-century commercial art into the harrowing, deeply personal story of her traumatic childhood. Over the course of a series of set pieces, a narrative emerges: after her parents' divorce, young Kayla bounces between the homes of her unstable, abusive mother and her disinterested father, who turns a blind eye when her brother molests her. As she grows up, she deals with being gay in a fundamentalist Christian environment and begins to abuse alcohol. The story is told out of chronological order and filtered through the formats of mass-produced print entertainment: picture books, comic strips, activity pages (a word search invites readers to find "vodka," "dissociation," and "PTSD"), paper dolls, recipe cards, comic-book advertisements ("Do You Need Money? Consider robbing your child's piggy bank!"), and more. Kayla's mother appears sometimes as a faceless 1950s housewife engaging in horrifying behavior, sometimes as a huge and terrifying presence, sometimes as a child who needs to be cared for herself. The flawless pastiche of commercial art and design, drenched in cheery primary colors, suggests the influence of Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti while establishing an aesthetic all its own. This four-color atomic bomb of a comic signals the arrival of a formidable talent. (Apr.)