While checking to see which Fante books were in stock, a typical bookstore procedure of mine, and
Factotum being the last book I finished,
1933 Was A Bad Year the last book I bought, yesterday I ended up learning about a graphic novel titled
Fante Bukowski.

It came out on Aug 8. I read it in a half hour while eating a cafe snack. It's a graphic novel, it reads like an adult's teen book. There are things like that to say. Or I mean, I just said that, but also this book has stayed in my feelings in a way I've enjoyed.
It's approximately the fourth graphic novel I've read, ever. I read
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, felt satisfied. This was unusual for me. I was clearly being marketed. I was against it! I mean,
R. Crumb drew around Bukowski writing.
I just figured this Fante Bukowski guy was destined to be a phony or a second-fiddle at best.
I'm sorry but I just derailed and I'm not even talking to anybody. So ok, I wanted to find a page to use as a quote, to contextualize the tone, mood, voice, oh you know, of Fante Bukowski, the graphic novel I read and could hypothetically create a strongly appreciative post in tribute to now, and I was specifically going to describe the writer and how by sampling
Saint Cole too I think he's crafty at portraying the hard life, and Amazon doesn't have a Fante Bukowski page sample so I was on Google Images, and so what distracted me was bumping into this photo of Bukowski wearing a Star Wars t-shirt:

I was super into being excited about seeing that photo. Then I wondered if it was real. I could imagine a Star Wars/Bukowski fan making it, putting it on the Internet, it not being looked up as it gets passed along, a photoshop which breezes into reality, then I saw this photo:

and I wondered if that was the shirt that was Photoshopped, then I wondered if that was the chair, and the cat is new of course but I realized the glasses were new, then wait that photo is unrelated, chill cat tho, and this was a real head-scratcher:

Then I landed on two Bukowski forums. One said the photos were from
Das war's, a photography book with Bukowski on the cover, but the other forum was chatting about something I forgot to read about but links to a photo album named after
Thomas Hoepker.
There was mention of a photo of both of them wearing the Star Wars t-shirt. The t-shirt appears to be real. She's
Linda King, "a poet, playwright, and artist working in painting and sculpture who was immortalized in the poetry and prose of her former love Charles Bukowski. During the 1970s, King edited the little magazine,
Purr."
It was mentioned on both Bukowski boards, which boards didn't mention the links of the other, or the same info, so I don't think they were conversationally linked, and they both mentioned hearing Bukowski cried during
Star Wars.
Ok so while looking again for the page to quote I bumped into this:

I'm going to concentrate and here the quote is I know which one I'm going to pick, ok I'll describe it first, this is from after the end of the story, this is the post-credit sequence in the book, and the abrupt quality of the message, together with how quickly I found and read this book, it does hit me in a funny way I mean:

That's not what a photo of me would look like, but I get that feeling, the worry and the whole bit, you know. And by the end of Fante Bukowski I was roped into the writer's style, his style, different from the actual Fante Bukowski, which name is described within the book as fake and the real name given is also not the writer's name, and by already being magnetized to this storytelling format and certain other aspects I was able to appreciate a graphic novel from a perspective I don't usually, so he got me hook, line, and sinker and so ok, ok. Mice.
