Time Under Tension [Paperback]

M.S. Harkness is graduating from art school in Minneapolis and facing a crossroads in life. She has a strained relationship with her mother, a sexually abusive father on parole, and is in love with an aspiring MMA fighter who mostly hangs out with her to get high and already has a girlfriend and career prospects with a fight promoter. An art career feels untenable  as one professor tells her, Dont expect to get by on this fucked-up broke girl shit. She decides to get a personal trainers certificate  it seems like a feasible and sensible career option  but continues to dabble as a sex worker and weed dealer because the money is too irresistible. With idle hands due to no classes or full-time work, M.S. has ample time to aimlessly fuck around  or, to get her shit together. I want to be better, I want to be stable and solid. I dont want to keep aimlessly shifting between untenable situations. Harkness delivers one of the best releases of 2023 in this exhilarating, heartbreaking, and often humorous memoir. Harknesss work is consistently tough, funny, and candid, and this plunge into the depths of her gloriously messy life is her strongest outing yet. Harkness reaches for something deeper and more emotionally resonant [and] proves she is a cartoonist worth watching. M.S. Harkness is quickly establishing herself as perhaps the premier comics memoirist of our time. A profound and confident memoir... one of the most remarkable releases of 2023. With? Harkness is a smart, tough, fearless cartoonist. With this book, M.S. Harkness has elevated her work to the elusive next-level. The drawings and pages are beautifully designed and rendered deftly; both the artwork and story possess a true sense of weight, volume, solidity, and presence, while somehow retaining touches of whimsy (that hair!) and wit (so many telling and perceptive conversations, all captured perfectly).?