Late Bloomer

Carol Tyler has been a professional (and highly acclaimed) cartoonist for over 20 years, appearing in such venues as Robert Crumb's Weirdo, Wimmen's Comix, and Drawn & Quarterly magazine.
But over the years her status as a working mother has drastically curtailed her ability to set aside time for her cartooning. Thus each rare new story from her pen has been greeted with hurrahsas well they should be, because she's one of the most skillful, caustic, and emphatic cartoon storytellers of her generation. This new book presents the biggest, richest and most delightful collection of Tyler's work to date featuring many new and previously unpublished works.
In "Migrant Mother" Tyler tells the grueling story of a cross-country trip with the flu and her terrible twos toddler using her trademark combination of rueful humor and emphathy. The full-color "Just A Bad Seed" is a meditation on a problem child who might not be such a problem after all, while "The Return of Mrs. Kite" chronicles a family crisishow her widowed grandmother fell in with a beau of questionable character. "Gone" (also in full color) is a stirring meditation on all kinds of loss, and "Why I'm A-gin' Southern Men" is a classic rant that dissects that particular breed of maleor at least a certain subspecies of "ex"eswith pitiless wit.
Other stories include "Sweet Miss Lee" (a reminiscence of an immigrant roommate and her fate), "There's Something Wrong with a Perfect Lawn" (a tale of suburban obsessiveness), "Little Crosshatch Mind" (where artistic impulses come from), and "Uncovered Property" (discovering the power of sexuality at an early age).
Tyler works equally well in delicately crisp black-and-white penstrokes and lushly watercolored paintings (this book will feature 60 pages of her stunning full-color work). All told, the three-dozen stories here will cement Tyler's reputation as a cartoonist to be reckoned with. 136 pages, 60 pages in color.

Carol Tyler is one of the most enduring cartoonists of her generation. Debuting with the short story "Un-Covered Property" in Weirdo in 1987, she went on to contribute to other anthologies of the era like Street Music, Twisted Sisters, Wimmens Comix, Drawn & Quarterly, and Zero Zero. Her debut book, The Job Thing (Fantagraphics, 1993), collected stories that examined the intersections between working-class labor, artistic expression, and misogyny. Her second collection, Late Bloomer (Fantagraphics, 2005), spanned her career to date, and showcased her facility with vibrant color alongside her expressive pen-and-ink brushwork. In 2009, her three-volume series You'll Never Know serialised a biography of her father, tracing his return from WWII and the way the trauma of war and expectations of masculinity, affect soldiers' families and reverberate through generations. The first volume won Tyler nominations for the Eisner Awards for both Best Writer/Artist and Best Painter/Multimedia Artist. The series was expanded and compiled as Soldier's Heart (Fantagraphics, 2015). Tyler delved further into her own history for the 2018 Fab 4 Mania, referencing her own 1965 diary for a memoir of a 13-year-old girl's life as focussed through obsession with the Beatles, culminating in attending their final Chicago concert. In recent years she taught in Sequential Art at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning between 2006 and 2019, and moved to integrate the teaching, creative, practical, and caregiving aspects of her life via the Ink Farm, a Kentucky retreat for cartoonists to work. In 2023, Married To Comics, a documentary about Tyler's life with husband and fellow cartoonist Justin Green (1945-2022), premiered at the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre. She is completing her next memoir/graphic novel, The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of my Grief, to be published in 2025 by Fantagraphics.