We're glad to see Mr. Levine is still at it.   Each page of Watching Days manages -- through a pen & ink alchemy mastered by Levine -- to cast a moment of stillness and quietude out of the hubbubbly headlong rush of chaotic urban life; enabling the reader to pause and reflect, as the days become years.   Read our review of the first issue for a more detailed look at what it's like.

Long suffering readers of this page may recall that we've gone on at some length about the first two issues of this series.  The 40-page third issue continues to plow the same furrow of interior monologues coupled with images of travel, both interior and exterior.  Watching Days is a melancholy meditation on watching one's life unfold and wondering what it's all about...

Our high opinion of Mr. LeVine's work is already on record in our reviews of the first issue of Watching Days Become Years and his self-published It Felt Fine Just to Lose.  His work in WDBY #2 continues to live up to the high standards established by these recent works.  Here, he employs his unique sythnesis of image and text to bring the reader in for some high resolution close-ups of the minutiae of quotidian consciousness.  Roughly hewn yet with exquisite subtleties enabled in large part by his excellent employment of grey-tone markers, LeVine's drawings consistently manage the difficult, seemingly magical feat of positioning the reader inside of his own head.  Whether looking in or looking out, when you're looking at Levine's images you can't help but feel that you're looking through his eyes.  This slight of hand-on-paper is actually accomplished by the accompanying text, which is such a concentrated embodiment of LeVine's authorial voice that it manages to bypass intellectual digestion and instead is absorbed directly into the reader's bloodstream-of-consciousness whereupon it directly insinuates itself in the perceptual centers, resulting in the internalization of the images with which it is paired.   The work in this second issue is all about the paradox of watching days become years while still finding brief, fleeting moments in which eternity can be held and savored in all its pain and glory.

This forty page comic book published by Dylan Williams’ fledgling Sparkplug Comic Books presents a distillation of the last five years of Jeff Levine’s life.  It’s a heady prospect, five years in forty pages.  That’s quite a concentration.  Can Levine pull it off?  Read our full length review by clicking on the image at left, and find out.  Recommended!