Joey Perr, Cartoon Graveyard

“Told with spare, precise drawings, and a dark, subtle sense of humor, Cartoon Graveyard is a layered portrait of loss, memory, and devotion. The simplicity and slimness of this book are deceptive: there is a generosity to Joey Perr’s comics that invites the reader to settle in, stick around. It is always wonderful to spend time here.”
—Anna Wiener of the New Yorker

“Poetic and humorous, dreamy and stark, Cartoon Graveyard aches with tenderness as it articulates the experience of caretaking for a parent, and grasps toward the incomprehensible absurdity of loss.”
—Alex Tatarsky

Joey Perr’s comic book Cartoon Graveyard is composed of vignette-like scenes chronicling Joey’s relationship with his late father, the artist Herb Perr, during the final years of his life—a period shaped by the onset of a neurological condition. These were seasons of caretaking in Brownstone Brooklyn, with a cocooned focus on bedtime (trying to sleep, putting another to sleep, falling asleep to ancient poetry and audiobooks), as well as moments of shifting confusion concentrated on being homebound, homeward-bound, or both at the same time.

Joey drew the original Cartoon Graveyard page, in a navy blue somewhere between tender affection and tender bruising, a year after his father’s passing, the morning after the two bumped into each other in a dream. This would be the first of a sequence of oneiric encounters, during which Herb doles out advice from the peanut gallery in the sky; is reincarnated (turns out he was okay); and, despite his son’s best efforts, comes apart at the seams. In Cartoon Graveyard, Joey Perr employs narrative distillation to hang onto the threads.