John, Dear
Coming Soon
A comic about a bad relationship. 47 pages, published by Retrofit Comics.
...without question the most soul-shattering release of 2018, its ingenious marriage of physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual abuse with established tropes of the “body horror” genre carving you out (…) and don’t even get me started on the sheer power of Lannes’ gorgeously-dark graphite illustrations. She’s channeling something held so deeply inside here that I honestly don’t know how she got through the making of it without having a complete nervous breakdown -- certainly reading it will bring you right up to the threshold of one yourself. In a word -- devastating. - Ryan Carey, in The Comics Journal's Best Comics of 2018
This is, above all, a story about darkness. It is figurative, in that it is about the mortification of intimate relationships and the implacable advance of control one person can exert over another. But it is literal as well, and Lannes wields it like no one else in comics. Certain pages are so deeply inked that faces vanish and reappear depending upon the lighting one reads them in. Shadows mist along the edges until they swell into the abyssal plains. Lannes’ lettering — small, white, regular — flickers across the churning blackness like candles in the wind. This is, in every respect, a descent: into abuse, into erasure, and into the cavernous possibilities of sequential art. - The Verge’s 10 Best Comics of 2018