Hair Shirt
By Patrick McEown
Hardback, 128 pp, $24.95
"Hair shirt: a shirt of haircloth formerly worn by ascetics and penitents."
John and Naomi were childhood sweethearts whose lives took them in different directions. As adults, they are reunited by accident and love takes hold again. But the painful memories, secrets and nightmares return.
From the Eisner Award-winning Canadian artist Patrick McEown, Hair Shirt is an emotive and expertly crafted reflection on grief, love and growing up.
John and Naomi were childhood sweethearts whose lives took them in different directions. As adults, they are reunited by accident and love takes hold again. But the painful memories, secrets and nightmares return.
From the Eisner Award-winning Canadian artist Patrick McEown, Hair Shirt is an emotive and expertly crafted reflection on grief, love and growing up.
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Patrick McEown
Patrick McEown was born in Ottawa, Canada, and began drawing at an early age. In the 1980s, he left high school to strike out on his own as a cartoonist and illustrator, contributing to Matt Wagner's Eisner-winning Grendel saga and Mike Mignola's Zombie World, among other projects. He worked as an animator and storyboard artist at Warner Bros. before studying fine arts at the University of Victoria. He currently teaches drawing at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.
Reviews
"An intense examination of self-sabotage, grief and the hidden motivations fueling our actions."
— Broken Frontier
"Hair Shirt is a wonderful piece of cartooning, filled with sketchy, misshapen lines which give visual weight to memory and its faults."
— Pop Matters
"McEown is refreshingly unafraid to pluck at raw nerves, dealing frankly and at times feverishly with his characters' sexual desires and hang-ups. Nothing about McEown's dark-hued, scratchy art or his intense exploration of guilt and shame is generic."
— The A.V. Club