‘Checked Out’: There’s Hope In The Library

The illustrations in cartoonist Katie Fricas’ debut graphic novel, Checked Out, are as bright as bowl of jellybeans, a lovely surprise given how much of the action takes place in New York City’s oldest library, a venerable private institution where “paintings of frowning people who had been sitting too long for their portraits” line the grand marble staircase and the circulation desk attendants must cater to the whims of its eccentric elderly members.

An entry level position reshelving books and giving tours represents a step up for Louise, a snaggle-toothed young artist who’s been making ends meet with a crummy retail job. Adorably rendered by Fricas as something close to a human Muppet, Louise is a familiar New York City type–brimming with creativity and more than a little adrift, wandering the streets for hours, disappearing from a friend’s rock show to make out with an unavailable coworker in the bathroom, then weeping in the mirror after…

She’s also incredibly driven, tirelessly researching courier pigeons and WWI for “an epic graphic novel” she’s bringing to life. The job at the library is a boon for this project. Whenever she can, Louise makes a beeline to the 940s, where the library shelves memoirs from during or immediately following WWI– “a hot spot of jacketless books waiting to be slipped from their slots.”

Louise’s greyscale preoccupation with the heroic, posthumously-decorated  WWI-era pigeon, Cher Ami is so pervasive, it seeps into her dreams, but as a young, single queer woman in search of meaningful romantic attachments, she also needs log some very 21^st century time on the dating apps.

Fricas deploys her comedic gifts to dazzling effect during a breakneck recap of Louise’s terrible“Gandr” dates. (A recent release party for Checked Out at The New York Society Library found the author expressing astonishment that The New Yorker had opted to excerpt “the queerest part” of the book.)

When Louise matches with a hot chef who shares her fascination for the city, the flirty banter quickly gives way to wordless, full page spreads of the two of them frolicking along the Coney Island boardwalk at night.  (Swoon. Also, RIP The Ghost Hole.)

Throughout, Fricas’ carefully observed illustrations make Checked Out as much a treat for New Yorkers as it is for bibliophiles, with defunct landmarks like Mars Bar, Pearl Paint and Dr. Jonathan Zizmor’s ubiquitous subway ads jockeying for cameos alongside such surviving faves as Arturo’s, Dumpling Man, and Surf Avenue’s Eldorado bumper car concession (“Bump yer ass off!”)

The story unfolds in sections, each bearing a highly literary title to hint at Louise’s evolution – The Age of Innocence, La Bâtarde, and Goodbye To All That.  (Watch for those titles to crop up on some outward facing spines in the illustrations, though Fricas represents the vast majority of the books with which Louise surrounds herself by elegant watercolored stripes.

Checked Out taps into something essential about being young, nerdy, turned on, and occasionally miserable in New York City, that fleeting moment when things seem both full of possibility and impossible to figure out.