Missouri Boy

Happy memories alternate with tragedy in these autographical snapshots of a young boy growing up in Missouri. Author Leland Myrick has created a graphic poem filled with startling and at times achingly beautiful images, stringing together a series of moments and experiences that formed his character, for better and for worse. These moving and intimate vignettes are both melancholy and redemptive, exploring the link between life and death, beginnings and endings. As he moves from boyhood to manhood, Myrick weathers complicated relationships, deaths and his older brother's jail sentence, with the old-fashioned quality of the illustrations lending the story of his life an almost timeless quality. "Missouri Boy" is at once a mediation on universal themes and a unique portrait of a small-town American childhood.