From Kirkus Reviews '07 Graphic Spotlight, June 15, 2007
Red Eye, Black Eye
K. Thor Jensen
Alternative Comics
January / 9781891867996 / $19.95 paperback
In a short time span, K.
Thor Jensen lost his
job, girlfriend, apartment
and grandmother. Bummer.
Does he reach for a
bottle of SSRIs? Nope—
instead, he hops a Greyhound
bus and leaves the
driving to them. “When I
watched my whole life fall apart in front of
me in late 2001,” says the author, “I never
thought that my experiences would wind up
becoming anything more than a sad footnote
to a life frittered away on whiskey and video
games. It took hitting rock bottom for me to
gain the motive force to really begin constructing
my adult identity as a functional
human being. As much as Red Eye, Black Eye
is a catastrophic, ramshackle road trip, it’s
also the story of one person trying to come to
terms with what they are and what they can
become. The quest for identity is such a
major trope of the road-trip genre that I
enjoyed inverting and examining it, and at the
end of the day I think I did find what I was
looking for, obliquely and ridiculously.”
Searching for himself, he pokes into the lives
of numerous folks whom he met over the
Internet. They unspool comic or deadpan or
raunchy stories—and all gratifyingly strange
—as Jensen is looking for
adventure: “I’m not gonna
be satisfied if I go home
without a black eye,” he
writes. Home again, his
accumulated wisdom can be
distilled into a simple declaration:
“My back hurts and
I’m greasy.”
