TLDR: For the rest of the year, House of Heroes is donating all profits from sales of Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
This email will deal with issues of mental health struggles and suicide. Step away if you need to, take care of yourself.
Lukas here. When we started the staff picks wall, It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth was the first book I moved next to my name. It’s my favorite book of 2022 and one of my favorite graphic novels ever printed. I’ve read it a few times now, and every time I take something entirely different from it. Zoe Thorogood tells the story of her life over the course of creating the book, with some pages being narrative scenes of events that played out and some being reflections on if anyone will ever read the book they’re currently holding. It’s an autobiography told as it’s created, following Thorogood’s whims and sensibilities on a daily basis, which is genius. It’s deeply personal but connecting, incredibly well-told without following any conventions, and so firmly rooted in comics while deeply divergent from the norms of the medium. I love this book so, so much and it’s truly such a unique and independent work. It’s a labor of love from Zoe who writes, draws, inks, colors, and letters every page to perfection and puts every bit of herself into the story. It’s a book that you could give to a million different people and have a million different, but positive, responses from. Truly one of the purest pieces of art I’ve engaged with. Despite what the rest of this email might imply, it’s not a total downer: it’s hilarious, endearing, and kind from cover to cover. It’s groundbreaking in comics, autobiography, and any genre that you might put it under. I promise you have never read anything like this, but you should.
Tripper’s turn. It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth was a book that seemed to appear out of nowhere for me. I can’t remember where I first saw the cover image that is now forever burned into my brain, but its effect on me made me want to read it immediately. What wound up happening was it falling into the pit of the “to read pile” that I know most voracious readers know all too well to be read at some point in the near future. What’s funny about the book is that it somehow found its way to me from under the pile when I needed to read it most. Thorogood’s incredibly personal story that unfolds in the graphic novel is what the best type of memoir does which is to let you feel every single emotion that the author felt in those moments of their life. It’s funny, depressing, and just human. What Thorogood has accomplished with Lonely is allow you a window into her soul to remind you just how what we struggle against is a collective, human struggle. To me, this is one of those stories that will stick with me and one I plan to revisit again and again to discover the graphic novel anew in a new era of life. It’s a triumph of the medium of graphic memoirs.
Lukas again. It started about a year into college… Every night I would go to bed with no idea how I would be feeling when I woke up. Wishing I wouldn’t wake up. I might be on top of the world, feeling rushed with energy and like I was the most charming, enlightened, intelligent person in history. Or I might have to bribe myself out of bed, so depressed that the basics of living seemed impossible and the idea of a future was crushingly unrealistic. Or I might be childishly angry at everything in the world for no reason. Sometimes these things would be happening at the same time. Anxiety turned night into horror, lying in the dark with an overactive imagination on hyperdrive about the twists and turns of my emotions. I was fighting–demanding–to make sense out of ideas that make no sense, and I very genuinely believed I had gone insane. It was months into these nights of drowning in my thoughts that I gave in to the worst of my thoughts and made an attempt on my life. Something about losing oxygen, about feeling the pressure build up through my sinus, about the stiffness of my lungs made me realize I needed help more than I needed to die. I was eventually given answers that regrouned me in reality through my diagnosis as Bipolar and will spend the rest of my life on a seizure prevention medication that was found to help manage mood swings. Through time my mood swings slowed and through medication they are tempered and quieted, but every single day is a challenge because of a simple chemical imbalance. For the rest of my life I will have no idea where on the spectrum of highs and lows I will wake up, and it’s terrifying. But I get up anyway, because I have people to love and comics to read.
Tripper here and it’s time to let something be out there in the open: I attempted suicide two years ago. It was a long road that led to my attempt starting with the pandemic to the ending of a long term relationship. For years, I had not been dealing with my anxiety which led to it controlling so many aspects of my life. I have most likely been struggling with anxiety my entire life, but it wasn’t something that was openly talked about for a majority of that time. Even writing this one paragraph right now, I can feel the tightness in my chest and the bubbling of negative thoughts creeping within me. Anxiety stopped me from going out, meeting people, forming relationships, and ultimately it contributed to me losing a relationship that I believed would have been a lifetime partnership. Everything went wrong in a single day for me, friendships changed immediately, I was hospitalized for suicidal idealization, and it just kept getting worse for months. One November morning I woke up and walked into my bathroom with every intention leading to the end. I didn’t succeed, I called my therapist, and I have been on the road to recovery and self betterment for two years now. I have been clean of attempts since then but I still struggle with my depression and anxiety on a daily basis. Through a combination of my family support, my friendships, my continued journey through therapy, and the community that House of Heroes have brought me, I have been able to continue healing myself.
We are sharing our stories of It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth and our personal struggles with mental health for a reason. This fall Zoe Thorogood lost her younger brother, James, to suicide. James is a massive part of her life as well as her memoir, and to honor him Thorogood will be donating all her profitis from It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth to suicide prevention through the end of the year. We want to honor what she is doing with her book in giving to a cause incredibly important to us. Starting today and until the end of the year House of Heroes Comics will donate all of our profits from It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The AFSP is there to educate the public about suicide and what leads an individual towards it, ways to prevent it, and to get help to those in need of it. If, like us, you’ve already purchased a copy of It’s Lonely, we highly suggest it as a gift for loved ones during the holiday. It’s a great, great read that appeals to comic and non-comic fans alike. We will also have a donation container at the checkout counter where you can donate any amount to this great cause.
We share our stories in hopes of destigmatizing these issues, of reminding us all that these are real struggles that the people in our lives are facing daily. That everybody is going through things nobody else can imagine. But if you’re reading this, comics mean something to you–and that connects you to everyone else reading this. Stories matter, people matter, and by supporting It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth you can reaffirm both of those statements.
Thank you, as always, for reading;
Save the world, read comics.
-Lukas and Tripper
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