The library is a great place for readers to discover comics, and it’s a great place for comics readers to check out things that they want to try without spending their hard-earned cash. I’m looking at comics that I find in the New York Public Library system.

Last week, the book I read probably suffered a bit from expectation.  Joshua W. Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest came to me as nearly a blank slate.  I’d heard the title enough to know it existed, but the between-covers content was completely unknown. The title refers to the towers of the mind contrasted against the incongruous mundanity of smalltown life. As such, it’s part autobiography and part tribute to childhood imagination. The narrative follows Cotter and his brother through their early childhood, dealing with schoolyard taunts, burying pets, losing toys and stumbling through awkward interactions with adult relatives. Running alongside the everyday and emotionally bruising reality, we get to witness Cotter’s young mind translating images into giant robots and imagining his own heroic triumph over impossible odds.

It’s that juxtaposition between imaginative victories and real struggles that gives the book its meat and raises it to engaging and successful levels. The art’s very strong. Cotter chooses to anthropomorphize everybody as cats. I can’t guess why he made that choice, but it adds a certain innocence to the characters, particularly the children. Cotter’s ability to weave between flights of fancy and grounded pseudo-tragedies is impressive, as it keeps you engaged, forcing you to question everything that’s happening in even the most straightforward sequences.

By balancing and weaving together mundanity and imagination, Cotter’s created a pretty compelling book. Each of its separate halves are solid, yet short of exceptional. Taken together, he’s crafted a whimsical, tragical, and very well drawn almost-memoir of young adolescence. I suspect that if they’re allowed exposure to the occasional cuss word, many teenage readers will connect with Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest, as will many adults.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Features, It Came From the NYPL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.