Bright-eyed At Midnight

Beginning at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2014, and ending on January 1, 2015, Leslie Stein drew a comics page a night. Fueled by an urge toward visual and narrative experimentation and made possible by serendipitous bouts of insomnia, Stein has combined words and images in a series of comic strips, paintings, and collages that reflect her life.

Bright-Eyed at Midnight collects the best of the 365 pages she made in 2014. By turns funny, unsettling, charming, improvisational, honest, and evocative, Stein explores her 1980s childhood, dreams, travel, artist's block, drinking, recording and playing rock shows, and bar patrons, along with quiet moments of introspection and loneliness in the most exciting city in America. Drawn in pen and ink and vibrant watercolors, and written in a minimalist, poetic cadence, Bright-Eyed at Midnight is a thoughtful, meditative visual diary from an acclaimed cartoonist.

“"The rendering of [Stein's] character self is very childlike and the color is a blazing flower corridor which adds up to the whole thing coming across as very hopeful and vulnerable yet dealing with adult issues. Like life, the whole deal is kind of heart breaking and yet tough."”

...Bright-Eyed at Midnight [is] a dreamy collage of watercolor images and words, with themes and scenes spanning from Stein's 1980s childhood, to playing rock and roll, to hanging out at bars, to dreams, to artist's block.--Isabella Biedenharn "Entertainment Weekly"
Fueled by insomnia and prompted by characters she encountered while tending bar or traveling the city or by bittersweet childhood memories..., [Stein] produced twelve months' worth of microstories that build a larger narrative through accumulation. In addition to diaristic recollections of everyday events, she meditates on collaged aphorisms and observations snipped from Jules Renard's Journal, offers up doodled portraits of teen crushes, and returns again and again to the moment just before dawn, when she is alone, awake, and contemplating her art and her existential questions.--Meg Lemke "The Paris Review"
In the right hands, a 'page-a-day' comics project is an enlightening exploration of a cartoonist's artistic impulses, and Leslie Stein's daily chronicle of her 2014 is one of the best. Bright-Eyed At Midnight... is an immensely charming read that spotlights Stein's artistic versatility.--Oliver Sava "The A.V. Club"
Insomnia, alcohol, rock'n'roll, loneliness, bartending, the toxicity of scented candles--they're all dissected in Leslie Stein's astounding Bright-Eyed At Midnight...--Scott Indrisek "Blouin Artinfo"

Leslie Stein was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000, moved to New York and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2004. Her early interest in comics and cartooning was revitalized around the turn of the century by her introduction to such independent/alternative cartoonists as Jim Woodring and Gilbert Hernandez. She has self-published her own comics series, Eye of the Majestic Creature, since 2005, the short stories from which have been published in two Majestic Creature collections to date. She plays guitar and sings in the band Prince Rupert's Drops. She lives in Brooklyn.

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