ALTA JOURNAL: Carol Lay's graphic novel My Time Machine

Published 2 months ago • 1 min read

I had a short piece published in Alta Weekly about a new graphic novel by an icon of the alt-comix scene. Carol Lay has been publishing in landmark underground anthologies like Weirdo and Wimmen’s Comix since the Reagan era. She’s also known for her own series Good Girls, which offered a sardonic punk-ified riff on the tropes of old romance comics.

Lay went on to do commercial illustration, animation, film storyboarding, and comics work for established outfits like DC, Marvel, Hannah Barbera, and Matt Groening’s Bongo Comics. But she’s probably best known for her long-running strip Story Minute, which appeared regularly in LA Weekly and later in Salon. Each new installment offered a surreal self-contained thought experiment—a sort of twelve-panel trip to the Twilight Zone that pulled from an array of genres. “I did horror, SF, romance, adventure, memoir or autobiographical,” she says. “Something for everyone, though my main goal is always to amuse myself.”

I got to talk to Lay about her latest work, which is a modern-day reimagining of the HG Wells book The Time Machine. You can read my piece here.

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