As a father myself, unable to even imagine the pain Tom & Leela have been through, it was often tortuous to read, and I dried my eyes a number of times. When was the last time a book made you cry? For me, it had been a long time. It’s an incredible, gripping book, which I stayed up late into the night reading all the way through. (Where would Bernie Sanders be without Hutch Owen?!) But for Rosalie Lightning he has created a new art style-malleable, scratchy and impressionistic (when needed), and deliriously vibrant, even though it’s “limited” to half-tones.
Tom is a master storyteller and cartoonist, and if he never did anything else the world would always have his creation Hutch Owen. This book fills in all that missing time. And the next time I saw Tom & Leela was the fall of 2014 (when I visited them at their school The Sequential Artists Workshop), when they had the gift of Rosalie’s little sister Molly Rose. I was in Chicago when I heard the horrible, terrible, tragic news of Rosalie’s death-I even wrote a short post about it back then. I only met their daughter Rosalie once, probably around 2010, shortly before they left town. I’ve known Tom and his fellow cartoonist wife, Leela Corman, (who’s basically the co-star of this book) for a really long time, as fellow travelers on the road of alternative comics-Sari & I were guests at their wedding-but I hadn’t seen much of them in the last 10 years, particularly after they left Brooklyn and moved to Gainesville, Florida. And it’s about real estate, and bike rides, and corn mazes, and getting your car stuck in the snow, and being adrift on a raft, and big moons in the sky, and dreams, and trees, and acorns, and about the “capacious hole in your heart” when your child dies. What is it about? It’s about My Neighbor Totoro, and Ponyo, and EC Comics, and Metaphrog, and James Bond, and Kurosawa movies, and Thich Nhat Hanh, and “O Superman,” and Jeff Mason. I just read Tom Hart‘s new book ROSALIE LIGHTNING (St.
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