Checked Out
Cartoonist: Katie Fricas
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Publication Date: May 2025
Checked Out is a graphic novel about trying to make a graphic novel, about working with books while working on a book, about where and how creatives get their ideas, and about being in your twenties in New York.
Louise starts the book working a dead-end job at a shoe store, living with a roommate and spending all her spare time obsessing over her graphic novel about pigeons in World War I. When she hears about a job opening at a library, she jumps at the opportunity to have access to all the research her graphic novel requires. But her job at the library ends up taking her and her novel to places she never expected.
The most immediately striking aspect of Checked Out is Fricas’s art, bold, bright splashes of watercolor over lively, naive pencil lines. This aesthetic, combined with Louise’s lyrical internal narration (“the weather rebelled, recklessly refusing seasons”), is reminiscent of Lynda Barry, but less refined. The childlike drawings are very expressive, and very specific. The environments especially evoke specific feelings of New York as a character that happens to be a place, reminding me of Roz Chast’s Going Into Town.
The “making it in NYC” story has been told thousands of times before, but Fricas avoids a lot of the predictable beats and creates something that feels new, interesting, and fun. The structure of Checked Out allows for freeform wandering. Time progresses, but also recedes into monochrome flashbacks, to Lou’s childhood, to her mother’s youth. The story wanders from Lou’s graphic novel project to her romantic relationships to her family life, her friends, and her day job, in a meandering progression that the art style feels especially suited for. Checked Out brings the reader very effectively into Lou’s head, achieving an intimacy with the character that is rare for comics, a format that generally requires characters to be viewed from the outside.
So what is Lou’s head like? She spends a lot of the book deeply preoccupied with her graphic novel, using her library job to check out dozens of reference books at a time, chasing threads of information about the Lost Battalion of World War I and pigeon husbandry as far as they go, even neglecting her relationships because of it. She spends most of her time off work drawing, reading, thinking about her comic. So when her library job brings her in touch with a patron who has surprising information on the subject of her graphic novel that completely changes how she was thinking about it, the revelation is shattering. Checked Out is ultimately not a book about successfully completing a creative project, but about how that project can sustain you while you work on it, and how to let go of it when you need to.
Besides Lou, Checked Out is populated by a colorful cast of characters. There’s Wanda, Lou’s married former coworker who loves to fool around with Louise but will never leave her husband for Lou; Lou’s roommate Cam, a dogwalker and petsitter; Lou’s friend Joey, a rocker who works the merch counter for the Blue Man Group as a day job; Lou’s family, her mother, father and sister; and Lou’s partner Gus, a chef she matches with on a dating app who doesn’t seem to fully understand her whole “graphic novel” thing. Not to mention the library staff and the people who patronize it. Every character feels real, distinct and memorable, even if they only appear for a few pages at most. The character designs are distinct enough that it’s easy to tell them apart, despite the simplistic, occasionally amorphous art style. People enter, exit, and return to Lou’s life as unceremoniously as they do in real life. It feels real.
More than anything, Checked Out feels real. It feels like being an artist, like being young and queer and in New York City, like spending a lot of time on things you’re not sure are going to work out in the end. The bright colors and clever narration make it an inviting journey right from the first page. It’s just fun to read! Fans of Lynda Barry, Roz Chast, and NYC would love this graphic novel debut.
Checked Out is available May 20 from D&Q
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