Catholics by Matt Runkle

Catholics makes use of illustration, collage, and letterpress-printed typography to explore my traditionalist Catholic upbringing. Eight prose sections relate fragments of memoir: my dad battles Masons for church parking spaces, my grandmother worries about my future in a post-Vatican II world where people receive communion in their hands, I learn about ACT-UP by reading my parents' right-wing newspaper, and my family's fervency is refracted through my own spiritually scuffed lens. The book's visual elements create their own various counter-narratives, exploring Church history, pre-Christian mythology, and the places where such spiritualities resonate with twentieth-century pop culture. In Catholics, the sacred and profane, the humorous and tragic, the zine and literary fine-press all end up as strange bedfellows in desperate need of confession.