Revisiting “The Snakepit Book” ten years on

book cover - snakepit bookRevisiting Ben Snakepit‘s The Snake Pit Book a full ten years after its original publication means you get to not only consider how Ben sees it at a remove, but also how you as the reader respond to his daily journal comics.

In his closing afterword, Ben makes the point that while at the time, he saw his life as being “the most wild and free,” but now realizes that this was “a horrible time,” where he was “depressed and lonely, heavily self-medicating and desperately seeking the companionship of whoever was around.”

The inner covers do a pretty good job of summing them up visually — the inner front is 16 panels of some variation on “going to work,” and the inner back is 16 of “bong hits” or “getting drunk.” And that’s really sort of the point of journal comics: you get what is, essentially, familiarity through repetition, which then itself makes the really interesting stuff stand out.
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