Thorogood is one of the very few comic creators I’ve encountered to successfully capture not only the experience of listening to music but the sensation that a song can have when it resonates with you for ill and good—as happens with her and Cake’s “ Open Book” in It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth from Image Comics.

It feels weird to give a star rating to something auto biographical, but honestly, I had to give a five-star rating because of my experience reading this book. So many times I found myself wondering what it was trying to say. It's an unfiltered expression of emotion and while I respect the author's choice to publish it I don't think it's polished enough for general consumption. I felt no empathy reading it - rather, I wanted her to take control those times she realised she was enjoying her misery. Ultimately, it was an incredibly frustrating read. Look, I probably sound like an insensitive jerk criticising an autobiographical account of depression. I'm not completely heartless - I do feel for her and I hope she finds a way to her own light. This was distressing to read because she's really embracing her illness instead of seeking help, and that's concerning to me. The people that will really love this comic are the ones that will relate to the messiness of mental illness and this comic does nothing to encourage seeking help - instead it seems to share the message that it's okay to wallow and stay blinded by your own misery. I HATE that. Her images and drawings are quite beautiful and poignant, although the subject matter is very dark. I think Thorogood is talented. I love how Zoe experiments with different styles throughout the book. The story flows seamlessly, despite the staccato changes in colour, layout, form, etc. It’s a great representation of the bumpy spiral-turned-whirlwind of mental illness.Thorogood elevates the dark material with her expressive use of the comics medium and the urgency of her voice. One to watch for the 2020s." -Forbes There is disappointment. There are failures. There is self-sabotage and unanswered questions and the author doesn’t tie up all the loose ends with a neat bow. It’s messy. It’s ambiguous. It’s real.

This could be useful for those who are going through something similar, but I won't be recommending it to anyone unless they are into that sort of thing. Book Genre: Biography, Comics, Graphic Novels, Graphic Novels Comics, Memoir, Mental Health, Nonfiction Did I mention most people are drawn as people with animal heads? It is awesome. I love her art and vision so much. Plot wise, don't expect much progression. It's not that kind of book. The same can be said about intrigue, mystery, and tension. Those aren't the point this time around. Instead, this is a high-resolution snapshot of our protagonist's mental state. She grows and gains perspective throughout the book, but her experience through the doldrums is always center stage.

Featured Reviews

Thanks to @netgalley for allowing me to read this eArc in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion. She chronicles six months of her life, including going to a convention and meeting/staying with an American artist she has kind of idealized and developed a crush on.

I withdrew my energy from it. I do the projects and make the things I want to make. I am polite and appropriate when people compliment or admire me, I hold the intellectual knowledge of their intentions, which are good and pro social. I was recently lying near death in the ICU and I was extremely comforted by how I have spent my time and the work I leave behind. I had the pleasure of delving into It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood, and it's a strikingly self-aware journey. Zoe lays bare her own flaws and struggles, making this graphic novel an intimate and metanarrative exploration of her life as an artist desperately piecing it together. Reading it feels like a direct confrontation, a book calling out its creator, and it's an enthralling experience that I thoroughly enjoyed. But it was only in 2019, aged barely 20, that Thorogood thought about turning her love of comics into a career. Shy and anxious, she attended a comics event in London organised by US publisher Image. She showed her portfolio and was invited to a dinner of comic creators where she met Kieron Gillen, a British writer who has worked extensively for Marvel on titles including Avengers and X-Men.

Thorogood's representations of herself are also striking. Thus, she portrays herself visually in about half a dozen different ways, with multiple versions of herself often interacting, arguing and competing for attention. The result is a riotous and often confusing explosion of her thoughts and feelings that leap out at the reader. Thorogood elevates the dark material with her expressive use of the comics medium and the urgency of her voice. One to watch for the 2020s. -Forbes First, thank you to the author, image comics and netgalley for allowing me to read an ebook for this masterpiece. These simplified ways to represent life coming face to face with reality underpin Zoe’s search for actual meaning. In the opening of the book, Zoe explains her hatred of mental health slogans, lines like “there are people who care about you.” She describes them as presumptuous, and there’s a limit to a one-size fits all approach to people’s emotions, just like there’s a limit to how universal a story can be. She has also designed, for Marvel, a character called Spider-UK, a British version of Spider-Man as part of its Spider-Verse multiple universes concept.

For those like me – especially fellow creatives – who have lived experience of mental illness, this ‘auto-bio-graphic-novel’ is a must-read. It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth’s search for a villain is perhaps the best example of this. Zoe travels to America and has a very complicated encounter with a potential love interest. Her various forms have different ideas about how this should go, from denying its importance all the way to hoping for love at first sight. The reality is that Zoe meets someone who is also living a messy, complicated life, and it’s less about a villain and more about having expectations for reality that don’t always fit inside the world of a story.Maybe I’d be dead if not for this. But instead I’m going to make something that didn’t exist before. And I think that’s beautiful.’ It's sad that in 21. century we are afraid to talk about mental issues as most of those talks end up on some shitty phrase of „support“ such as „think positive“, „you can do it“, „there is nothing wrong with you“. Yet, some people decide to let it all out, a burst of creative energy that gives us a remarkable piece of art with artists pieces of themselves embedded into it.