Bright-Eyed At Midnight - Hardcover

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.

“...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

“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

“The results of [Stein's] productivity experiment are never less than delightful, and in some places downright great. ...[S]uddenly a capable cartoonist has become something more, possibly a great deal more. ... The result is a well-rounded story of Stein as both a burgeoning artist and a wayward thirtysomething―living her childhood dreams of being both a musician and artist but still fighting occasional bouts of disappointment and depression.”
- Tim O'Neil, The A.V. Club

“...Stein’s clamorous, colourful pages swoon between childhood memories and anecdotes of daily life, or between dreamy impressionist doodling and full-on action-painter freak-outs. The results read like Kandinsky illustrating Virginia Woolf – less a conventional diary than a stream of consciousness brought vibrantly to life. ... Stein’s recreations of life – especially inner life, those reflective moments alone with oneself – are fluid and evanescent, remarkably true to the texture of actual experience.”
- Sean Rogers, The Globe and Mail

“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

“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

“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.”
- Gary Panter, The Comics Journal

“The book is not just an experiment, not just the result of a year’s worth of creative output, but a record of one person’s encounters with the desperation of loneliness as well as the warmth of meaningful connection. Both states are depicted in a gorgeous, heightened manner that speaks directly to Stein’s approach to life.”
- Rob Clough, The Comics Journal

“Leslie Stein is one of the brightest lights of current day comics-making; her comics are very personal, both in her motivation to do them and the iconography she chooses to realize those stories.”
- Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter