Sleeping While Standing

Taki Soma’s life has taken unexpected turns on top of twists over the years, a journey that starts in Japan in the early 1980s and spins through traumatic family loss, a childhood murder, drugs, comics, medical mysteries, true love, fertility, pets, and zombies. All of that and more is depicted here in a series of brilliant, deceptively simple short comics chronicling one young artist’s blazing bright milestones of life, the ones we don’t always celebrate but still return to again and again in our dreams. A compelling authorial voice with sly wit and an accomplished cartoonist’s eye for visual play, meaningful details, and imaginative interludes, Soma gently guides us through a collection of tales built on emotional themes rather than chronology that jump back and forth across the decades, for a bracingly effective and inspiring memoir. Sleeping While Standing is an unflinching look at harrowing moments in the life of a highly regarded creator, threaded through with levity and love.