Melville House Books

The first graphic version of a Tao Lin book has appeared. Well, the first graphic version of a scene from a Tao Lin book. Well, all right, the first graphic version of a sentence from a Tao Lin book.

Spoiler alert (you didn’t look at the picture yet, did you?) Indie comic darling and Lin fan Jeffrey Brown has distilled the most raucous scene from Shoplifting from American Apparel — the one where the protagonist finds himself in jail with a bunch of wackos — into one panel. My favorite sentence is still “The inmate with the mop held back the inmate without a mop.” But Brown’s rendering (okay, look left) really does capture the scene.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.