Toward the tail end of 2017 — yeah, I know, I’m still playing a little bit of “catch-up” here and there, sue me — the always-interesting Retrofit Comics/Big Planet Comics publishing co-venture released one of the more thoroughly engrossing books of the year, cartoonist/painter Tara Booth’s How To Be Alive, but no matter how many times I’ve perused its contents, either casually or with serious intent (it lends itself quite nicely to either approach, although the latter will always be more rewarding, of course), I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the best way to review it. Finally, after one complex, slowly-developing emotional reaction to it after another, I seemed to arrive back at where I started with it, and that’s when it sunk in : this was Booth’s point all along.

If there’s beauty to be found in the mundane, this comic offers the surest evidence…