Breakthrough (Life on the Brink)

Chris Fink has just awoken in the desert. Soaked, disoriented, the first person he sees is his own fictional character. What is reality? What does an eco-feminist movement from the future — and a long-abandoned but never-forgotten indie comic, Leopold & Brink — have to do with his predicament? From this SF framework emerges a metafictional memoir, as epic and intimate as life itself.

Embarking in earnest with the onset of the 2020 lockdowns, Fink’s years-long journey of graphic healing hit an unexpected detour when he received a brain cancer diagnosis midway through constructing this book. Not to be deterred, the tragedy and comedy of life become tools to break new liberative ground, a lifetime of drawing conjures fresh and playful visual expressions to compliment his stream of consciousness style.

Vonnegut-esque slipstreams of memory weave together tumultuous youth, romantic misadventures, and the looping pathways of a working artist, in a tapestry of loss and longing. Buoyed by the ephemera of yesteryear, this is an ode to the comics, film, and TV that raised him, and the adults who didn’t. A saga of catharsis and reconciliation, Breakthrough: Life on the Brink is a story to live by.