Breakthrough: Life on the Brink [PRE-ORDER 04/14]

NOT YET AVAILABLE. Pre-order now. This title is scheduled to arrive on April 14, 2026.

Note: release dates and prices are tentative and subject to change at the publisher's whim.

When pre-ordering with multiple items, remember your order will not ship until the last pre-ordered item is in stock. If you want items to ship separately, place separate orders;

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.

Author/Artist: Christopher Fink
Publisher: Fantragraphics
Pages: 160pp
Size: 7.75 x 10.5
Notes: color, softcover
Release Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 979-8875002182