How To Be Happy [Hardcover]

The first collection of literary short comics stories by an award-winning cartoonist. Davis is rightfully a rising talent, and one of her greatest gifts is her ability to build narrative momentum. She creates suspense, mystery and come-hither curiosity by never overtipping her artful hand. Impressively varied and emotionally resonant. With images ranging from scratchy black-and-white line drawings to robust images saturated with color, Davis is comfortable in a variety of styles, carefully choosing each one to best fit her tone and mood. ... A powerful collection that resonates with all the ills, real and imagined, of our modern life. Though Davis' tales can be wildly different in look and narrative, they are united by themes of yearning, of characters searching for the thing that will make their lives better. ...Remarkable ... exquisite ... Eleanor Davis breakthrough short story collection Lies! Deceit and rank mendacity! Eleanor Davis promises what current pop music insists is perfectly possible  that you can be happy  and then she doesn't deliver. Instead she draws comics full of hilarious surrealism, gut-tugging tropes and eloquent despair. How dare she? ... In her roundabout way, she dramatizes not the prospect of happiness, but the promise of it. Her natural territory is found in all the funny and tragic effects of that promise. ...[ This collection is astounding because of how hard Davis works to sequence each story and provide appropriate interstitial material. Seeing all of these stories at once provides a remarkable and surprising sense of cohesiveness, as many of them are about restless, lost, and sometimes doomed people. The drawings, the use of color, and the overall packaging all fit into this feeling of reading almost a hand-made item. Daviss brightly coloured, melancholic short stories catalogue different approaches to the form -- here a science fiction tale, there a glimpse of suburban young love -- all featuring lost souls desperate for haló+