I talked about Carol Lay all the way back in 2017 (see The Giant Licking Machine), but did her a disservice by only featuring a single one of her Story Minutes. I am here to remedy that inadequacy.
In 1990, Lay drew a 5-page story for LA Weekly titled The Thing Under the Futon (read it here – the thing under the futon even has tentacles). « The pay was several times what independent comics paid and the audience was larger and included women », Lay quips on her website, so a one-time story planted the seed for a weekly comic strip called Story Minute, so named because it would just take you a minute to read a story (I might also add that it’s very difficult to stop at reading just one). That eventually was rechristened Way Lay and ran until 2008.
As I mentioned in the earlier post, the most recent collection of these is Illiterature, published in 2012, and it’s where the strips below have been selected from. Lay picks all kinds of topics as strip springboards, but since I am the one selecting the ones to feature, there’s a definite interpersonal tilt, as I think her forte is her ability to showcase the inner workings of a close relationship by plonking people into a slightly surreal or sci-fi context. The line between cynical and poignant is navigated with ease.
« I kept mostly to the order in which I produced the strips, but I took the liberty of tossing some clinkers or shuffling a few so that they flow better in book form… I also used my artistic license to improve on some of these older works – I’m a better writer and artist than I was when I created these strips… In a sense several of the strips in these volumes are ‘director’s cuts’ in that I’m a better director now than when I drew them. »
Support Carol Lay on her Patreon here!
~ ds
Who's Out There? 
You were right back in 2017 – some people don’t like the way she draws mouths. I fear I’m one of them.
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That’s fair! I’m not crazy about them either, but I like the rest of her style, and the writing also makes up for any mouth annoyance imho.
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There was kind of a Golden Age back in the, what?, late eighties/early nineties of this kind of thing being available in bookstores. I got this and a book by Michael Dougan and a book by Ben Katchor and sundry other books within a few years of each other.
And those mouths? They grew on me, and I mean by the end of reading just one of the stories. They’re just another weird–if idiosyncratic–cartooning convention. Is it faulty memory or did she have a photo of herself with one of those mouths overlaid on top of her?
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