“When I lay down my head at the end of my day — nothing would, nothing would please me better than I find that you’re there”
Next up on the roster we have It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be by Lizzy Stewart, which is published by Fantagraphics.
I dig stories in which regular people do regular things, and so I’m probably naturally inclined to like this. 
Stewart wrote and drew several short stories over the course of a few years, and they’re just regular people doing normal stuff, with Stewart finding the beauty, tragedy, comedy, and hope in regular life. She begins with a story about a girl growing up on an “estate” in England, which we’d probably call the “projects.” The girl (Stewart doesn’t name her characters very often) is narrating about a time when her mother sent her out to look for her brother because there’s a thunderstorm coming, and she finds him with two other kids watching what appears to be an injured fox (it’s definitely a fox, but it might not be injured). They build a shelter for the fox so the rain doesn’t get it, and it turns into a communal shrine before the rain hits, which washes it all away. That’s what happens. The next story is a brief vignette about a girl who is embarrassed by how much she blushes. Then there’s a nice story about two high school girls walking a dog and trying not to be bored. Eventually they climb up on the roof of one of their school buildings (it’s only one story) and hang out with a boy they only vaguely know. Next is a short, almost wordless story about a girl walking home. Yep. After that we get a story about two young women meeting up after several years apart and finding out what has changed with them. Then we get a short interlude about a woman deciding to eat lunch someplace different than usual and seeing a man she went to school with. She doesn’t talk to him or anything, she just sees him. The “title track” of the book is about three friends, each of whom has an odd experience on the same day that they all hang out together. After that we get a brief tale about a woman who begins a YouTube channel featuring the quietest sounds she can make. I guess it’s sort-of ASMR stuff, but that term is never mentioned. Finally, two women who used to know each other fairly well meet at a wedding and reconnect.
Yes, nothing here is earth-shattering. 
But Stewart does an excellent job with dialogue, allowing her characters to meander around before finding nice pieces of insight as they move through their lives. In the story about the fox, the girl narrates about what living on the estate was like and how the fox seemed to bring the community together, even though they didn’t know each other (she never learns the names of the two people her brother was hanging out with). When the storm destroys the shelter and the fox disappears (did get washed away? did it die? did it get up and run off?), she doesn’t belabor the point of things ending and tenuous connections being severed – we can do it ourselves. The two girls who walk the dog find a place for themselves on top of the roof, and the boy who joins them seems all right … until he’s with his friends, whom he brings back with him when he goes to get snacks. Nothing bad happens, it’s just that the vibe is different, and the place is no longer special, and the girls who “discovered” it feel like they don’t fit in. It’s a nice comment on sexism and male dominance – the boys aren’t doing anything wrong, but they end up excluding the girls anyway. The two stories about friends reuniting after years apart are similar, obviously, but Stewart’s dialogue is so good that they feel very different, even as each story comments on the awkwardness of losing touch and the pain that accompanies the loss of a friendship, even when it’s nobody’s fault. The stories are all about the way people connect, how difficult it can be, and how easy it is to lose that connection. They’re not sad stories, exactly, but there’s a melancholy that pervades them because there’s a feeling of life moving on and people’s priorities changing, none of which is sad but which can come with a nostalgia for simpler times. 
Stewart is too clever to make that theme overt, but it’s there, and it adds a good touch of wistfulness to the stories, as these women try to figure out what comes next.
Stewart has a nice art style that stays simple but allows her a wide range within that simplicity. Her faces are generally abstract, but this allows her to add just a line or two to show deep emotions, which is nicely done. Despite the simplicity of the faces and bodies, she knows what she’s doing, and she creates very interesting worlds for these characters to inhabit, with nice details that show places that might not be exotic, but can offer comfort or add foreboding depending on Stewart’s focus and the colors she uses. She uses watercolors, chunky lines, and what appear to be colored pencils in various places to emphasize certain moods. When she wants to, she can be very precise, and the final image of the comic is a beautifully multi-colored full-page drawing with very tight lines, which seems to turn the characters more “real,” if that’s the right word. As if they were struggling toward a sense of belonging, and through Stewart’s use of color and line, they found it at the end. Stewart isn’t the flashiest artist, but like all good artists, she thinks about the way to present the material to work in tandem with the writing, and it’s a nice book to look at.
I enjoyed It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be, as I like stories where the creator gives us complicated life that doesn’t always resolve in neat ways, as life is often messy. Stewart doesn’t do depressing stuff in this book, but she does do complicated stuff, and it’s a nice book to read for that reason.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
