Beyer’s affinity for the latter played a bigger role in 2012's Year One, a more conventional but equally communication-based graphic novel that preceded Little Fish. As her book isn't as defined by panels and traditional sequential storytelling, an occasional page simultaneously hosts both her zine tendencies and a love for comics art. Beyer is keen on painting, "obsessively document(ing)" her days hanging out with friends, and punk music. There are sled rides across snowcapped fields, big basement sleepovers washed in the artificial glow of lousy television, and simple declarations. In shaping the journey toward a new life in Baltimore, compulsive list-maker Beyer's memories of her small hometown of Paw Paw, Michigan - where she "grew up on 100 acres of land" - are painted with bursts of free verse and nostalgic imagery. Her thoughts are far removed from the cold digital sphere from which they were extracted, and "social" in Little Fish refers only to the antiquated physical relationship-building that we all used to engage in years back, when "like" actually meant "like," and the like. Beyer's journalizing and poems are organic and scrapbook-like, fashioned to mimic the stapled zines that likely paired with seven inches and silkscreened shirts peddled at punk shows she visited back then (dig the Shel Silverstein-fired surrealism and painstaking detail lent to Beyer's flier artwork). The author's formerly digitized records here are reproduced as diary pages and typewriter-sourced ruminating pasted between drawings for Little Fish. LiveJournal, a social network and blog hosting platform that pre-dates Facebook and MySpace (although still set to many home pages in Russia), was the ideal forum for her High Fidelity-type pros and cons assessments and, of course, a "things I'll miss about home" rundown when she prepared to head off to a Baltimore, Maryland art school. Humble as it may seem, Beyer's blend of rough, zine patchwork-styled pages and graphic memoir is marked by a bold perspective on diary comics and the graphic storytelling medium.Īt more than 270 pages, the young adult graphic novel Little Fish is hardly "little" - it's rife with verse and photocopied bulleted lists, a recreation and re-appropriation of the seemingly active LiveJournal account that Beyer registered in her youth.
Little Fish: A Memoir From a Different Kind of Year is a mixed media affair, with Beyer employing an intimate DIY approach honed in her adolescent zine-making days as often as she does black and white comics art, melding list- and poetry-driven prose with personal comics. Ramsey Beyer's spirited, often warm chronicling of her real-life journey through her freshman year at college is as much driven by the familiar trappings of teenagedom as it is punk rock, against-the-grain sensibility. Little Fish: A Memoir From a Different Kind of Year
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