Squirrel Mother - Softcover

Kelso's moral probing and feel for understated emotions goes far beyond the talents of most of her peers. The deceptively clean style and pastel colors suggest a light read, but Kelso's work can be devastating in the way she pares down the excess to get at the essence of a particular moment or situation. --Ed Howard ""The Best Comics of the Decade" ""

This is Megan Kelso's second collection of graphic shorts. It is a collection of Kelso's graphic short stories, all of which originally appeared in magazines and anthologies between 2000 and 2005. Kelso's work is characterised by subject matter that fits roughly into two disparate camps: personal and semi-autobiographical stories that draw heavily on the details of her childhood and adolescence and stories about the idea of America and American history. She is distinguished from many of her contemporaries as much by her spare, elegant linework, leisurely pacing and psychological acuity as by her absence of nihilism, scatology, and formal experimentation. "The Squirrel Mother" features 15 stories, each between three and 22 pages in full colour including two penned especially for this volume. Her personal stories are each self-contained but take place inside the same world, where similar characters inhabit different stories the America stories are broader in subject matter, taking on events of political and historical significance and wrestling with a vision of the American experience.