You Can Never Die: A Graphic Memoir

“These pages feel like having a conversation with a close friend, someone who is interesting and funny and deeply honest.”

Harry Bliss is well known for his New Yorker cartoons and children’s books. This graphic memoir reveals a side to him that deepens the reader’s experience of both. Framed as a story about his beloved dog, Penny, Bliss weaves in childhood memories, friendships with famous cartoonists, his career as a writer-illustrator, and family stories with all he has learned from being around Penny. The format of short chapters punctuated with cartoons and pages from his sketchbook allows us to see Bliss’ thoughts in different forms, from pithy one-liners to loving drawings. All of them enrich our sense of who Bliss is, first and foremost as a talented artist.

Bliss opens the book with an “Intention” rather than an “Introduction,” explaining his motives for writing.

“I’m not going to call this an introduction, even though technically that’s what it is. I don’t like the word introduction. It feels cold to me. I put a lot of stock in words. As a cartoonist, I have to. Introduction feels like an off chord or a rim shot where a soft kick-ass belongs. So, let’s lose introduction and instead call this my intention. What are my intentions with you? I would like you to better understand me, connect with me . . . If I can make a connection with you here in the pages that follow, we’ve got intimacy, and intimacy is my intention.”

The pages that follow fulfill his goal beautifully. We meet Bliss’ difficult parents and follow his development as both artist and humorist. Most of all, we see how Penny has shaped his life.

“When I see a dog, I feel myself becoming tender—I soften. This same shifting-toward-tenderness happens when I see children. The accumulation of this shifting in energy can be significant. Does it make us kinder to each other? Nourish our sense of humanity? Did Penny’s furry face in the window make the world kinder? We can never know how many lives our pets touch, but the numbers over those seventeen years of Penny’s life cannot be underestimated.”

Facing this page is the perfect cartoon to express this thought with a humorous twist. A dog looks out a window at the city below and thinks, “There has to be more to this life than just being ‘a good boy.’”

Another example of how cartoons and text resonate is the chapter about Bliss’ brief childhood stint as a bully, something he still feels bad about. The chapter opens:

“A common refrain from my father that has been repeated countless times for the past twenty years is, ‘I have no regrets. I’ve lived a good life. I served my country, had a decent career, a family—no regrets, goddamit, I’ve had a good life.’ Whenever I hear my father say this, I always think, Is he trying to convince me or himself? I never take him seriously. Of course he has regrets. We all have regrets.”

The facing cartoon shows “The Rings of Regret.” A tree stump’s rings are labeled with these events:

“*1970: Used a kitchen knife to open a can of peaches.

*1973: Set off a bottle rocket in my dad’s Buick—he was driving.

*1980: Hospitalized after telling ticket holders waiting to see The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader was Luke’s father.

*1990: Watched Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer for the 5th time.

*2003: Gave my mother my cellphone number.

*2009: Ingested psilocybin at the opera.

*2016: Tuned into election results.”

The beautiful sections from his sketchbook are an added bonus, seeing how Bliss’s brain works as he looks at the world. His description of how freeing art is for him, what keeping sketchbooks means to him, plus his stunning drawing of feet, should inspire a generation of artists. And his chapters on starting at The New Yorker are a reminder of what the journalism/publishing world used to be like in the ancient days before social media as a means for content delivery.

These pages feel like having a conversation with a close friend, someone who is interesting and funny and deeply honest. If that is what Bliss meant by his intention of “intimacy,” he has succeeded magnificently.