Joey Perr’s comic book Cartoon Graveyard is composed of vignette-like scenes chronicling Joey’s relationship with his late father, the artist Herb Perr, during the final years of his life—a period shaped by the onset of a neurological condition. These were seasons of caretaking in Brownstone Brooklyn, with a cocooned focus on bedtime (trying to sleep, putting another to sleep, falling asleep to ancient poetry and audiobooks), as well as moments of shifting confusion concentrated on being homebound, homeward-bound, or both at the same time.
Joey drew the original Cartoon Graveyard page, in a navy blue somewhere between tender affection and tender bruising, a year after his father’s passing, the morning after the two bumped into each other in a dream. This would be the first of a sequence of oneiric encounters, during which Herb doles out advice from the peanut gallery in the sky; is reincarnated (turns out he was okay); and, despite his son’s best efforts, comes apart at the seams. In Cartoon Graveyard, Joey Perr employs narrative distillation to hang onto the threads.