True-to-life comics & writers my age

It feels like a lot of comic book writers are about me age and/or they live in the Bay Area. What's the deal with that?

I just finished "Sleepwalk" by Adrian Tomine in which a lot of the stories take place in Berkeley. Turns out he is exactly my age and living just across the bay from me. Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) is about 5 years my senior. Chynna Clugston-Major (Blue Monday) is one year younger than I am and Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man & Ex Machina) is two. I have only read the first 25 pages of so of Phoebe Gloeckner's illustrated novle ("The Diary of a Teenage Girl"), but I was sure she gerw up in San Francisco. The details where just so specific. Looking her up on wikipedia, she is about 15 years older than I am. she and I did attend the same high school (at least for a year or two) and she attended the a rival grade school. Does all of this mean anything? Not really, just something that seems to connect me to the authors and their work.

This genre of the true to life comic is an interesting one. There are the autobiographies that I talked about the other day and the other ones that just feel like slices of life. In that category I would put Ghost World, Sleepwalker, and The Diary of a Teenage Girl. They don't reach out and drag me into the story the way Fables or Y do, but they are oddly compelling. They don't have the same flow as the novelist comics have, they are more like moments as a fly on the wall. Or pieces of memory told in what may or may not be a linear way.

I figured that I would enjoy reading Ghost World because I enjoyed the movie. The book has the teenage feel of awkwardness, angst, and randomness. It isn't pretty or shiny like disney cartoons. It doesn't have superheroes or supervillans who are on some path or good or evil. It just has two girls, kind of meandering. And that meandering has a familiarity to it.

Sleepwalker is more of little snippets of people's lives. In this collection, the charaters don't seem to reoccur from story to story. Each piece is more of a random story from each of thier lives. What unites them all seems to be a sadness in all of their stories, many of them love-lorn. As I read many of the chapters, I wasn't sure if I liked it or not, but sure enough when I got to the end of one, I would continue on to the next one. Perhaps I was a bit uncomfortable because they had the familiar air of stories that can't exactly be categorized or explained, but these same stories make up who we are as people.