Chris Fink has just awoken in the desert. Soaked, disoriented, the first person he sees is his own fictional character. What is reality? What does an eco-feminist movement from the future — and a long-abandoned but never-forgotten indie comic, Leopold & Brink — have to do with his predicament? From this SF framework emerges a metafictional memoir, as epic and intimate as life itself. Embarking in earnest with the onset of the 2020 lockdowns, Fink’s years-long journey of graphic healing hit an unexpected detour when he received a brain cancer diagnosis midway through constructing this book. Not to be deterred, the tragedy and comedy of life become tools to break new liberative ground, a lifetime of drawing conjures fresh and playful visual expressions to compliment his stream of consciousness style. Vonnegut-esque slipstreams of memory weave together tumultuous youth, romantic misadventures, and the looping pathways of a working artist, in a tapestry of loss and longing. Buoyed by the ephemera of yesteryear, this is an ode to the comics, film, and TV that raised him, and the adults who didn’t. A saga of catharsis and reconciliation, Breakthrough: Life on the Brink is a story to live by.
