by Jared Gardner

In this age of autobiographical comics, nothing has become more typical and familiar than the story of the “special” child, tormented by her “normal” friends, misunderstood by her inadequate teachers, and increasingly alienated from her well-intentioned parents. Miss Lasko-Gross’s Escape from “Special” may in fact be the most typical autobiographical comic ever written. It is a familiar story (see Satrapi, Gloekner, David B., Weinstein, etc.) told in an increasingly familiar way (see Satrapi, Gloekner, David B., Weinstein, etc.). And as much as it is a story worth telling, I cannot help but wish that a new generation of comics memoirists compelled to revisit their childhood might chart some new escape routes.

In the willful primitivism of Lasko-Gross’s art, there is a vibrant energy that tells us something about the child she was and the artist she would become. As in so many of these stories, art provides the route out of the enforced silences of being a “freak” in a world of Stepford children. But ultimately, the art too feels familiar: a kind of mash-up of the two-dimensional symbology of Satrapi, the subjective backgrounds of David B., the rough-hewn edges of Lauren Weinstein, and the threatening sexuality of Phoebe Gloeckner. And as soon as the comparison is made, the need for this book (for anyone other than Lasko-Gross, that is) becomes harder to justify. The back cover tells us that Lasko-Gross’s art is defined by “detailed backgrounds,” but these pale in comparison to the nuance of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. We are told that her art has an “expressive, clean-line character drawing,” a contradictory description (expressive and clean-line?) that  fails to account for the decidedly un-clean lines that grace the page. And finally we are promised a “muted full-color palette,” a promise which sent me into a brief panic that I had indeed gone color-blind, as I could not for the life of me identify any of these colors beyond gray, beige, and a kind of pale green. If this approach to “color” is Lasko-Gross’s claim to originality in terms of her visual presentation of the story, it is likely only to make readers long for the heavy blacks and whites of Persepolis and Epileptic once again.

Of course I have no doubt that Lasko-Gross came by her style naturally, and I don’t mean to suggest that her work is derivative. It is simply that any comics reader who has read even one of the creators I mention above (or Fun Home, 100 Monsters, The Quitter) is going to feel as if they have read all of this before—right down to the joy of embracing the outsider identity and the inevitably simultaneous discovery of the power of images and words to do battle on one’s own behalf in what will be a lifetime of struggle against “normal.” Indeed, Lasko-Gross tells this last story particularly well, showing how her middle-school tormenters were laid low (in her own mind, which of course is where all the meaningful victories happen) by the new-found power of language and her comics. And her sketches of early childhood—and of her experiences in “special” education classes as she struggled with behavioral and reading issues—are funny and moving. Or rather funny or moving, as Lasko-Gross has a hard time achieving both effects within the same story.

And this perhaps gets to the heart of the problem with this book—the reason why I suspect it will leave so many readers at a loss for what to say, or whether to care. In trying to carve out a unique narrative space for her story—which is the story of pretty much every comic creator and most comic readers—Lasko-Gross has taken the short sketch approach of some of her predecessors and pushed it about as far as it can go. Many of the sketches are just a couple pages, and the connections between them are not easily accessible in many places. Except for her inevitable maturation from early childhood to adolescence, there is little in Melissa’s story to suggest a story—little in this book to make it clear what it is that makes it a book, and not a sketchbook of somewhat randomly assembled fragments. As much as I want to give her the benefit of the doubt (partly because I am a bit scared of her after reading this book), I just am not convinced that she has really figured out what she wants to do with this book or what she wants us to take away.

All of that (not so very kindly) said, I can imagine this book finding its perfect audience in the library of other “special” younger readers, especially teenage girls. There is much to connect to, and I admire Lasko-Gross’s remarkable ability to summon up the feelings and thoughts of that difficult age for those of us (all of us?) who knew ourselves as freaks and outsiders throughout those tumultuous years. But while it might well be good “medicine” for the troubled teen in your life, like all medicine, its expiration date is firmly fixed. And once past, it is not a book that will have the power to cure what ails you.