Preparing to Bite by Keiler Roberts

Achingly human auto-bio comics that extract big laughs from the small moments

Cartoonist Keiler Roberts quit making comics. Or did she?

Preparing to Bite, her latest collection of all-new, one-page comics is a return to perfectform. Roberts skewers innocuous aspects of everyday life and dissects them for theirunique absurdity: from cooking meals, to keeping doctors’ appointments, to owning pets,and even navigating now-inescapable zoom calls. These vignettes portray a woman inmiddle-age grappling with the realities of being a mother, a wife, a friend, a daughter, andlastly (perhaps even least of all), a practicing artist—all while dealing with the long-termeffects of a debilitating disease.

From page to page, Roberts jumps from moment to moment, expertly using the comicsform as nobody else can while showing off what it can do that no other form can. Preparingto Bite captures the transient gestures of life in the modern age, both mundane and inane.