A few weeks ago I read Kessler’s The Gull Yettin, a graphic novel told with no words and sometimes dreamlike scenes that drift and fracture through each other. There’s something in the art style—the bold bright lines, the simple figures—that for me evokes childhood. Like a child drawing their family, drawing the house they come from, or the house that is their imagined home. It reminds me of an interview I heard a long time ago with cartoonist Charles Schultz—I think he said (in explaining some of the themes in his comic, Peanuts) that it seems like most people stop feeling the questions and hurts and confusions they had as a child, but that all those things, for him, never went away. I wonder if all those feelings for most of us never go away, and we just get better at not talking about them. Or maybe worse at hearing what they’re saying to us.                 I’m back in California, a little ways from where I was born. A little ways from where I learned to swim, where I laid awake, too scared of nightmares to fall asleep, where I got lost in stories my parents read me while I played with twigs and pinecones, where I watched an escaped parakeet way up in an oak’s branches and wondered for the first time about pets and cages, trees and open skies. I think that’s why Kessler’s The Gull Yetin sticks with me. I love the kind of art that lets us keep drawing and finding and caring with/for the children there are in everyone we love. Ourselves, I hope, included.