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Breakthrough: Life on the Brink
Breakthrough is a tragicomic memoir detailing the author's search for belonging while navigating inadequate caregivers, romantic misadventures, the looping path of a career artist, and a terminal brain tumor.
Chris Fink has just awoken in the desert. Soaked, disoriented, the first person he sees is his own fictional character. What is reality? What does an eco-feminist movement from the future ― and a long-abandoned but never-forgotten indie comic, Leopold & Brink ― have to do with his predicament? From this SF framework emerges a metafictional memoir, as epic and intimate as life itself.
Embarking in earnest with the onset of the 2020 lockdowns, Fink’s years-long journey of graphic healing hit an unexpected detour when he received a brain cancer diagnosis midway through constructing this book. Not to be deterred, the tragedy and comedy of life become tools to break new liberative ground, a lifetime of drawing conjures fresh and playful visual expressions to compliment his stream of consciousness style.
Vonnegut-esque slipstreams of memory weave together tumultuous youth, romantic misadventures, and the looping pathways of a working artist, in a tapestry of loss and longing. Buoyed by the ephemera of yesteryear, this is an ode to the comics, film, and TV that raised him, and the adults who didn’t. A saga of catharsis and reconciliation, Breakthrough: Life on the Brink is a story to live by.
Chris Fink has just awoken in the desert. Soaked, disoriented, the first person he sees is his own fictional character. What is reality? What does an eco-feminist movement from the future ― and a long-abandoned but never-forgotten indie comic, Leopold & Brink ― have to do with his predicament? From this SF framework emerges a metafictional memoir, as epic and intimate as life itself.
Embarking in earnest with the onset of the 2020 lockdowns, Fink’s years-long journey of graphic healing hit an unexpected detour when he received a brain cancer diagnosis midway through constructing this book. Not to be deterred, the tragedy and comedy of life become tools to break new liberative ground, a lifetime of drawing conjures fresh and playful visual expressions to compliment his stream of consciousness style.
Vonnegut-esque slipstreams of memory weave together tumultuous youth, romantic misadventures, and the looping pathways of a working artist, in a tapestry of loss and longing. Buoyed by the ephemera of yesteryear, this is an ode to the comics, film, and TV that raised him, and the adults who didn’t. A saga of catharsis and reconciliation, Breakthrough: Life on the Brink is a story to live by.
160 pages, Paperback
First published May 19, 2026
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May 21, 2026
This book is colorful in all senses of the word and well worth the read! Fink has documented the hardest thing to document - his sense of his own history - and he did it after a brain cancer diagnosis that would have stopped most people in their tracks. If you're intrigued, I would also recommend his Leopold and Brink titles, which feed right into the eco-feminist meta-story of his life, and capture an entirely different kind of history.
Displaying 1 of 1 review