Review by Frank Plowright

Lou is employed in a New York shoe store, but aspires to be a graphic novelist. To this end she’s constantly working on her ideas for a story about a pigeon during World War I, with the general chaos of her life exemplified by a habit of rushing to her room mid-conversation to note down an idea that’s occurred.

Writers writing about the difficulty of writing is a well trodden path that can easily become tiresomely self-absorbed, and Checked Out doesn’t entirely avoid moments of that nature in what has the feeling of Katie Fricas presenting Lou as her avatar. However, a contagious enthusiasm gradually erodes concerns as Lou moves into her new job working in a library and Checked Out becomes a paean to the love of reading.

To get to that, however, you’re going to have to come to an accommodation with deliberately naive art, scrappy to the point of pencil roughs still visible beneath the ink lines and extremely randomly applied colour. Large panels are populated with two-dimensional people designed to be grotesque amid locations scribbled off in a hurry. The whole aesthetic is contrived to alienate the majority who’ll only see the childlike results.

Amid learning about the systems and order applied to the exclusive library we’re treated to Lou’s contrarily chaotic dating life, which is an amusing catalogue of disasters from people making the wrong choices to being offputtingly open on the first date. Those and memories of eccentric library visitors are appealingly anecdotal, but a fair amount of 357 pages aren’t necessary in any sense. Do we need Lou heading from one place to another or the indulgence of pages from the graphic novel within the graphic novel? Some detours are interesting, so perhaps have their place, but a family story doesn’t connect with much else, and might have been better postponed for another project.

As it is, Checked Out has its diversions and you’ll learn about the Dewey cataloguing system, but it’s squarely aimed at the few, not the many.