Asleep At The Wheel

comic. no known publisher. main creators: Peter McCallum and Jim Walke. $2.50 per, $8 for 4 94 Quebec Ave. Toronto, ON M6P 2V4

There is something perfect in each of the four issues of Asleep At The Wheel. Whether it is the scratching lines that shape a tired old man’s expression, a single ingenuous scrap of dialogue, or a plot that precisely captures the way it was, is and always will be — well, that is up to you. Just so long as you read these devastatingly simple illustrated stories. As always, tender nostalgia, evocative art-work and a compelling desire to order experience makes great art. What is most precise about many of these stories and their accompanying illustrations is what they leave out. It is up to the aching haunt that is your mind to secure the necessary connections, to turn a page and think ‘hey, wait a minute, how did they know that about my life?’ Convenience stores, landlords, adolescent trips to the dump in search of rats and Penthouse all make up the drifting highway shoulder of our past — Asleep At The Wheel remembers what we forgot to forget: the beauty in that driving concrete.

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