Overview

Beginning at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2014, and ending on January 1, 2015, Leslie Stein drew a comics page a night. Fueled by an urge toward visual and narrative experimentation and made possible by serendipitous bouts of insomnia, Stein has combined words and images in a series of comic strips, paintings, and collages that reflect her life. Bright-Eyed at Midnight collects the best of the 365 pages she made in 2014. By turns funny, unsettling, charming, improvisational, honest, and evocative, Stein explores her 1980s childhood, dreams, travel, artist's block, drinking, recording and playing rock shows, and bar patrons, along with quiet moments of introspection and loneliness in the most exciting city in America. Drawn in pen and ink and vibrant watercolors, and written in a minimalist, poetic cadence, Bright-Eyed at Midnight is a thoughtful, meditative visual diary from an acclaimed cartoonist.

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9781606998380

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Reviews

The rendering of [Stein's] character self is very childlike and the color is a blazing flower corridor which adds up to the whole thing coming across as very hopeful and vulnerable yet dealing with adult issues. Like life, the whole deal is kind of heart breaking and yet tough.--Gary Panter Leslie Stein is one of the brightest lights of current day comics-making; her comics are very personal, both in her motivation to do them and the iconography she chooses to realize those stories.--Tom Spurgeon The results of [Stein's] productivity experiment are never less than delightful, and in some places downright great. ...[S]uddenly a capable cartoonist has become something more, possibly a great deal more. ... The result is a well-rounded story of Stein as both a burgeoning artist and a wayward thirtysomething--living her childhood dreams of being both a musician and artist but still fighting occasional bouts of disappointment and depression.--Tim O'Neil The book is not just an experiment, not just the result of a year's worth of creative output, but a record of one person's encounters with the desperation of loneliness as well as the warmth of meaningful connection. Both states are depicted in a gorgeous, heightened manner that speaks directly to Stein's approach to life.--Rob Clough ...Stein's clamorous, colourful pages swoon between childhood memories and anecdotes of daily life, or between dreamy impressionist doodling and full-on action-painter freak-outs. The results read like Kandinsky illustrating Virginia Woolf - less a conventional diary than a stream of consciousness brought vibrantly to life. ... Stein's recreations of life - especially inner life, those reflective moments alone with oneself - are fluid and evanescent, remarkably true to the texture of actual experience.--Sean Rogers

The rendering of [Stein's] character self is very childlike and the color is a blazing flower corridor which adds up to the whole thing coming across as very hopeful and vulnerable yet dealing with adult issues. Like life, the whole deal is kind of heart breaking and yet tough. --Gary Panter

The results of [Stein's] productivity experiment are never less than delightful, and in some places downright great. ...[S]uddenly a capable cartoonist has become something more, possibly a great deal more. ... The result is a well-rounded story of Stein as both a burgeoning artist and a wayward thirtysomething living her childhood dreams of being both a musician and artist but still fighting occasional bouts of disappointment and depression.--Tim O'Neil

The book is not just an experiment, not just the result of a year's worth of creative output, but a record of one person's encounters with the desperation of loneliness as well as the warmth of meaningful connection. Both states are depicted in a gorgeous, heightened manner that speaks directly to Stein's approach to life.--Rob Clough

Author Information

Leslie Stein was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000, moved to New York and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2004. Her early interest in comics and cartooning was revitalized around the turn of the century by her introduction to such independent/alternative cartoonists as Jim Woodring and Gilbert Hernandez. She has self-published her own comics series, Eye of the Majestic Creature, since 2005, the short stories from which have been published in two Majestic Creature collections to date. She plays guitar and sings in the band Prince Rupert's Drops. She lives in Brooklyn.

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