The excellence and variety of the art in this short comics story collection is matched only by the painful incisiveness of the stories, most circling around attempts both foolish and sincere to find happiness. … How to Be Happy is fearless and fantastic, unafraid to break rules or to make new ones. And what art it is: there may be nothing Davis can’t beautifully illustrate. She presents, in short, a more realistic picture of what it means to be a human, with our ever-present mind/body tug-of-war, than almost anyone else out there making art. … stories often feature tremendous longing and sadness, but they also lushly suggest what a blessing it is to be alive and in the world. Her natural territory is found in all the funny and tragic effects of that promise. In her roundabout way, she dramatizes not the prospect of happiness, but the promise of it. Instead she draws comics full of hilarious surrealism, gut-tugging tropes and eloquent despair. Lies! Deceit and rank mendacity! Eleanor Davis promises what current pop music insists is perfectly possible - that you can be happy - and then she doesn't deliver.
Though Davis' tales can be wildly different in look and narrative, they are united by themes of yearning, of characters searching for the thing that will make their lives better.Remarkable. Instead, the story that emerges from them forms a cryptic play on society’s expectations for happiness. Don’t be fooled by the title, though you won’t find the key to happiness in these illustrations. How to be Happy an imaginative collection of graphic literary short stories. The success of this collection suggests that short pieces are likely Davis' métier, but what's here is so accomplished that it's natural to hope for a book-length work next time out. Shortlist, Slate's 2014 Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Print Comic of the YearĢ015 Ignatz Award Winner: Outstanding Anthology or Collection Named one of NPR's and Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2014. Happy shows the full range of Davis’s graphic skills - sketchy drawing, polished pen and ink line work, and meticulously designed full color painted panels- which are always in the service of a narrative that builds to a quietly devastating climax. Davis achieves a rare, subtle poignancy in her narratives that are at once compelling and elusive, pregnant with mystery and a deeply satisfying emotional resonance. Happy represents the best stories she’s drawn for such curatorial venues as Mome and No-Brow, as well as her own self-publishing and web efforts. Davis is one of the finest cartoonists of her generation, and has been producing comics since the mid-2000s. This is the first collection of literary short comics stories by an award-winning cartoonist.Įleanor Davis’s How to be Happy is the artist’s first collection of graphic/literary short stories.
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