Marcel Proust felt that life's events were most truly experienced after the fact, in their recreation through memory, and created what many consider the greatest novel ever penned to back up his claim.  On a much more modest scale, Sally Ingraham has recalled and recreated some select moments of her own in Walkabout.  She recently relocated from Pittsburgh to Santa Fe, NM, at which remove she has reflected on her former environs in the form of this pictographic recreation of a walk, or walks -- there's quite a bit of ground covered in this issue's 72 pages, which have been hand sewn into a cozy, hand made comic book that may serve as a catalyst for readers' own memories of similar perambulations, like Proust's madeleine...

The Suzy & Cecil strip by Gabriella Tito and Sally Ingraham just recently celebrated it's first birthday, so it is now in its second year of appearing daily on Comics Workbook.   Here's a look at the first 30 strips, to get an idea of how it started out.  It's easy to see the strip improving, even in this brief period.  That this improvement continued is evidenced by the 44 strips in this collection. All the strips in the collection are full color, and color is a big part of the appeal.  A multitude of approaches to what can be accomplished in a daily strip are tried – all within the formal constraint of a square grid of four square panels – and it is clear that experimentation is a key component of this series.  And experimentation, after all, is a form of play, and playing is what Suzy & Cecil do best.  

Reading this strip on a daily basis on Comics Workbook, and then grouped together here in this collection, is a constant reminder that play is a crucial part of being.    We all live our lives within the formal constraints placed upon us by our family, work, relationships, finances, etc., – in a word, society – and beyond that by the limits placed on us by nature and biology.  The actual, physical play we engaged in as children becomes ever more channeled and rule bound as we age, as our constraints change from those placed upon us by our parents and schools to those placed upon us by the need to survive.  One of the keys to happiness is acknowledging these constraints and then working within them.  That might even serve as a working definition of fun.  In these Suzy & Cecil strips we see, within the diegesis, on the the level of content, the characters playing; having fun – with each other, by themselves, with others, going on adventures, experiencing nature, and more.  And, on the formal level, we see the artists playing, within the constraints of the grid; experimenting – with character portrayals, drawing techniques, color palettes, pacing, and more.  In this way the recollected play of childhood innocence merges with the adult play based on experience and the development of skills.