Having delivered intimate and unsettling portraits of his traumatic upbringing and struggles with mental illness in previous books such as Couch Tag and LOVF, it seems only natural that cartoonist Jesse Reklaw would take art as therapy a step further by doing daily diary comics — but as his late-2019 collection of them published by Fantagraphics Underground demonstrates, he’s chosen to go about the task in rather meticulous fashion, and hast taken its title, Keeping Score, absolutely literally.

Which, I mean, more power to him — diary comics are almost always therapeutic for their creators in one way or another, so why not come up with, say, a visual shorthand chart recording things such one’s medications, moods, and alcohol intake, as Reklaw has done here? If you’re gonna go in, you might as well go all in, otherwise why even bother? There’s no doubt about this particular cartoonist’s…