Anyone who was paying attention to self-published comics in the '80s knows about Silly Daddy, but I wasn't and I picked up the whole thing at once, which was pretty intense. Back in the days when an autobiographical comic was still a novelty, Chiappetta started doing some little stories about his daughter and his young marriage. The latter quickly fell apart and it became a story about divorce and unwelcome self-awareness. Harvey Pekar is an obvious reference but Pekar and Chiappetta didn't have a lot in common, besides being kind of hard to live with. Silly Daddy is weird and lonesome and often silly, and as Chiappetta gradually learned how to draw, the words and pictures played together unpredictably to very good effect. Toward the end of the first part (originally collected as The Long Goodbye), his stream of consciousness took an odd turn as he started rewriting his present and future in fantasy terms; for a while, Joe and his daughter became nomads in a scary but playful future world, in which his bizarre visuals really took off. That was followed by further solid stories about Joe and his friends; then a pause, during which he became a born-again Christian. He tried briefly to revive the comic in terms of his new interests-- not very successfully, but I still think whatever Chiappetta does is pretty interesting and I'd like to see more. ( )