Storeyville

I read this when it first came out, in 1995, as a newsprint standalone when Frank Santoro and his then girlfriend, Katie Glicksberg, who did the colors and handled production, were living in the vaguely defined Tenderloin of San Francisco. They had stacks and stacks of it still in their tiny apartment a year later, when I moved down from Sacramento to take a new job. It says something about the unpredictable path of culture that dozen years later the book had been forgotten then remembered, collected by the publisher Picturebox as a lovingly scanned hardcover (and, later, softcover) volume with an introduction by Chris Ware. It's just a beautiful book, a nostalgia-rich story mixing matters of hard times economics and buddy journey.

""The narrative itself while clearly the product of a romantic imagination nevertheless manages to steer clear of cliché and brings to the page a vision of its subject that comes alive to the reader. The central protagonist and narrator is Will, a young man stuck in the Pittsburgh of way-back-when and rarin’ to go, but not sure where to until he learns that his former mentor/partner/best-friend, the Reverend Rudy, has been sighted in Montreal, and then he’s off! ....
Storeyville is a rare one-of-a-kind treat that anyone who is at all passionate about comics is sure to not only enjoy reading, but also to come away from the experience with a deeper appreciation of what the medium of Comics is capable." Bill Boichel, Copacetic Comics