Patrick Kyle's Recommended Reading

Marc Bell - Shrimpy and Paul and Friends (Highwater Books, 2001)

Patrick Kyle: I had a bit of an awakening after reading this book for the first time as a student. I was still learning about the world of comics and had been reading a lot of non-fiction, auto-bio comics and the like. Attempting to emulate those, I tried to be serious/profound to a painful degree in my own work (I was a teenager, can you blame me?) Bell taught me to throw all of that seriousness away - to be looser and more adventurous with my drawing and most importantly to emphasize having fun.

Mark Beyer - Agony (New York Review Comics, 2016)

PK: Beyer's characters Amy and Jordan move through a terrifying hell-scape at a breakneck pace, finding themselves in a new situation on almost every page. Their dialogue is often a description of what is happening to them in the moment or reminding the reader where they're at in the story. I kept this approach in mind constantly while working on Distance mover, a science fiction serial I worked on in 2012 and 2013. Beyer's singular cartooning and inventiveness with imagery and the comic page is endlessly inspiring to me.

Ginette Lapalme - Confetti (Koyama Press, 2015)

PK: Ginette Lapalme is an incredible multi-disciplinary artist who happens to be my partner and best friend. This monograph from Koyama Press collects some of her multi-media works from the early 2000s up to 2015 - ranging from painted comics about winking asses, ceramic cats dunked in ooze, 700 layer screen prints and unforgettable sketchbook spreads. Ginette and I have worked together extensively with our friend Chris Kuzma as the now mostly defunct art collective/curatorial group Wowee Zonk. Her carefree but never careless approach to drawing, her ingenuity with materials and her incredible sense of humour was and is still a huge influence to both Chris and I.

Lala Albert - Seasonal Shift (Breakdown Press, 2019)

PK: Lala is my close friend and contemporary whose work I truly adore. This volume from Breakdown Press collects Lala's difficult-to-find short comics from 2013 to 2019. Lala's drawings are some of the best out there - beautifully gestural, organic, playful and fun. The worlds that she depicts are mysterious and inviting, and her narratives, whether about our coexistence with technology or our connection to nature, are always poignant and relatable. 2017's Wet Earth (included in this volume) is masterwork of wordless comics through its expertly paced moments of calm exposition and its explosive sequences of nature-versus-elf.

Robert Storr - Phillip Guston (Abbeville Press, 1991)

PK: I first came to know of Phillip Guston's work through Marc Bell's Comics, specifically "Gustun on these Layers of the Earth" from the 2009 Collection "Hot Potatoe" - featuring the eponymous cyclopean character 'Gustun' based on similar characters from Guston's late work. This period of cartoon-adjacent painting from near the end of his life is what Guston is now most known for - but his career spanned many different approaches to image making, from his De Chirico inspired early works to being amongst the chief innovators of abstract expressionism in the 1950s. Like many cartoonists, I am infatuated with Guston's late period - but what inspires me most about Guston and his career overall is his willingness to destroy what he had done before - to tear it all down and start again.