Bright-Eyed at Midnight

Leslie Stein

Aug 2015 · Fantagraphics Books

About this ebook

Beginning at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2014, and ending on January 1, 2015, Leslie Stein drew a comics page a night. Fueled by an urge toward visual and narrative experimentation and made possible by serendipitous bouts of insomnia, Stein has combined words and images in a series of comic strips, paintings, and collages that reflect her life.

Bright-Eyed at Midnight collects the best of the 365 pages she made in 2014. By turns funny, unsettling, charming, improvisational, honest, and evocative, Stein explores her 1980s childhood, dreams, travel, artist’s block, drinking, recording and playing rock shows, and bar patrons, along with quiet moments of introspection and loneliness in the most exciting city in America. Drawn in pen and ink and vibrant watercolors, and written in a minimalist, poetic cadence, Bright-Eyed at Midnight is a thoughtful, meditative visual diary from an acclaimed cartoonist.

About the author

Leslie Stein was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000, moved to New York and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2004. Her early interest in comics and cartooning was revitalized around the turn of the century by her introduction to such independent/alternative cartoonists as Jim Woodring and Gilbert Hernandez. She has self-published her own comics series, Eye of the Majestic Creature, since 2005, the short stories from which have been published in two Majestic Creature collections to date. She plays guitar and sings in the band Prince Rupert's Drops. She lives in Brooklyn.