Preparing to Bite
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Achingly human auto-bio comics that extract big laughs from the small moments
Cartoonist Keiler Roberts quit making comics. Or did she?
Preparing to Bite, her latest collection of all-new, one-page comics is a return to perfect
form. Roberts skewers innocuous aspects of everyday life and dissects them for their
unique absurdity: from cooking meals, to keeping doctors’ appointments, to owning pets,
and even navigating now-inescapable zoom calls. These vignettes portray a woman in
middle-age grappling with the realities of being a mother, a wife, a friend, a daughter, and
lastly (perhaps even least of all), a practicing artist—all while dealing with the long-term
effects of a debilitating disease.
From page to page, Roberts jumps from moment to moment, expertly using the comics
form as nobody else can while showing off what it can do that no other form can. Preparing
to Bite captures the transient gestures of life in the modern age, both mundane and inane.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roberts follows up The Joy of Quitting with more deadpan glimpses into her daily life that reveal much by saying little. Much of this volume was drawn during the Covid-19 lockdowns and their immediate aftermath, and Roberts captures the alternately claustrophobic and cozy vibes of the period succinctly. "It's been really weird getting used to seeing my co-workers without masks," she reflects. "Mouths and noses are a lot less attractive than eyes." Her fine-lined black-and-white sketches capture moments ranging from the weighty (dealing with her multiple sclerosis, Roberts monitors her health and reflects on the "black holes in her brain") to the aggressively mundane ("Can I take a picture?" she asks her kid on their first trip to Sam's Club. "This is a special moment in your childhood"). Moments of domestic comedy include Keiler's rejoinder, "Is anyone downstairs cooking?" to her child's inquiry about the whereabouts of dinner, or her husband's gentle ribbing about the many times she's vowed to quit drawing. Despite the difficulties sustaining her creative practice, she finds meaning in art: "The bad part of making comics again," she says, "is that I feel worse on days when I'm too sick to do it." Fans of Roberts's dry humor and relentless honesty will be grateful that she finds it hard to quit.
