Heads or Tails

By Lilli Carré. Published by Fantagraphics. 

Softcover, 200 pages, Colour and B&W, 2015. 

This is an award-winning, one-woman anthology of short comics fiction, which previously appeared in books such as Best American Nonrequired Reading.

The comics collected in Heads or Tails display a virtuosic breadth of visual styles and color palettes, each in perfect service to the story; they range from experimental one-pagers to masterpieces like “The Thing About Madeline” (featured in The Best American Comics 2008), to novellas like “The Carnival” (featured in David Sedaris’ and Dave Eggers’ 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading). Carré’s elegant stories read like the gothic family narratives of Flannery O’Connor or Carson McCullers. Poetic rhythms—a coin flip, a circling Ferris wheel—are punctuated by elements of melancholic fantasy, and are pushed forward by character-driven, naturalistic dialogue.