Fantagraphics is one of the most important contemporary comics publishers in the United States. It has almost single-handedly changed the way that comics are published, treated and perceived in that country (and beyond), and it opened the path for many other publishers, both domestically and abroad, especially where their political and financial relationships with the authors are concerned. I guess it has also influenced many authors for its sheer existence (and wonderful catalogue). When a new author pops up in the scene and he or she does so with the Fantagraphics seal of quality, one raises the bar of expectations.
However, I must say that by reading this book and by associating it to many other contemporary works and these with a history of its purported genre(s), I feel as if we are already behind the cusp of autobiographical comics, and the powerfulness it promised was drenched away by sheer solipsism and misplaced narcissism. 

Within this territory, we could arguably point out Craig Thompson’s Blankets as a turning point. Reviewing the history of American autobiographical comics in a nutshell, we can look at the emergence of that genre as a sort of resistance against the mainstream, accepted genres of comics (superheroes, funny animals, etc.). Up to a certain point, that resistance work presented an otherness that stood against the dross homogeneous sameness being presented by comics as a whole, whether that otherness was presented first-hand, as in Pekar, Gloeckner, and Jim Woodring (no matter how oneiric he gets), or as reportage/reconstruction, as in Jack Jackson’s oeuvre. Maus would coalesce these two strands. In any case, all the books that have made that history were always focused on some aspect of their character’s life that was, well, “bigger than life” or at least quite big in that life: death, birth, drugs, violence, rape, etc. Slowly, other authors started to move in into calmer territories of life, even if equally touching (I’m thinking of Seth, some of Chester Brown’s work, and the capriciousness of Joe Matt’s “little” – in every sense of the word – stories). Thompson’s book focused in on a very simple anecdote or episode of his character’s (an autobiographical surrogate), but it still appeals strongly to a moving tenderness, it entails the outing of an unspeakable fear, it renders visible the overwhelming, if common, sensations of a coming of age story. The author himself says that “nothing happens” in his book, but that’s not entirely true. The pacing of the story is quiet and calm, quite different from the “trauma” and “confessions” of the previous authors, but it still deals with sensitive issues and the development of its characters. 

If we discussed French autobiographic comics tradition - and other countries’ as well, from Spain to South Korea - we would see a much more prominence of that “calm, slice of life” strand (through Baudoin, the authors from L’Association and Ego comme x, and so forth), but my guess is that Miss Lasko-Gross is responding within a narrower tradition, even though it may count on the translations of books such as David B.’s L’Ascension du Haut Mal/Epileptic and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Purportedly, Lasko-Gross is constructing “a semi-autobiographical trilogy”, being this the second book.
The point is, the crystallization of autobiographical comics into a genre brought a certain degree of lukewarm and even lacklustre examples. This is the problem of genres, of course; if it fills the bill and nothing else, then what’s the point? These great authors we’ve mentioned have produced books that can be placed in more than one category. But when they fall into a tighter place, then they’re in trouble. 

A mess of everything is not without its merits. It has style, it has a nice eye on slacker, high school students’ petty reality, their disaffected ways, it creates perfectly the mentality of its self-obsessed, self-outcast, holier than thou (as with all kids who buy into one or another so-called subcultures) protagonist, Melissa (“Miss” is a self-appointed nickname). Presented in very short episodes, often less than ten pages, and in a few cases one or two pages, we witness the interim years of this Jewish suburban princess dealing with everything that adolescents have to deal with – budding sexuality, drugs and alcohol experiments, the mandatory anti-authoritarian stance in relationship with school and parents (even when these are actually kind of laidback and cool), mixed feelings towards friends and acquaintances, tribe-integration, and so on… tinted by the specificities of American culture (although “urban tribes”, bullying and social expectations play a role also in Europe, kids are a tad more relaxed with their experimentation than in the States, I guess: or so it seems, from fiction). 
But at the end of the day, what have we seen beyond this? Not much, to tell you the truth. Now I can interpret this in two ways: whether we have here a perfect portrait of the dismal reality of North American suburban contemporary (90s’) life, or we’re dealing with unremarkable dross.
Perhaps after strong authors exploring their traumatic upbringing or revealing the traces and bruises inherited from it (from Justin Green to Phoebe Glockner, from Spain to Debbie Dreschler, from Keiji Kakazawa to Carlos Giménez), or others dealing with smaller, yet clamant facts of their lifes (Harvey Pekar and Baudoin in the forefront, but also Jean-Christophe Menu, Vanoli, among so many others), or reconstructing memories that go slightly beyond one’s own life (David B., Marjane Satrapi, Baru, and through a very different vein, Marko Turunen), perhaps we have reached a time where deadpan reports become important. Not all of us have remarkable lives, or life-shattering and altering episodes… And we are not before a sort of Less Than Zero either: there is no room for vagaries of whatever kind. 
To that effect, Lasko-Gross brings into the weak events of Melissa’s life an unsuspecting strength. Although the “facts” are conveyed in a somewhat impassive tone from the narrator – there are no narrative captions, the episode titles are usually simple – there are many interventions at the level of the plasticity of the drawings, not only at the level of representation (of the mood swings of the characters, their highs and lows and crisis), but also through the presence of a kind of tight, bush-like geometric pattern behind the characters, as a sort of framing device, a spotlight, an accentuating scaffolding. Structurally speaking, it is akin to what people would doodle distractedly on a piece of paper, filling up a blank corner, but it may be compared also with Craig Thompson’s “snowflake” from Blankets. A sort of leitmotiv of a sustained or even unfolding sentiment. Something lurks there, in silence, waiting to blossom. 
And the book does end in a positive, even uplifting note, with a single phone call back to a supposedly lost friend, after Melissa moves into the “big city”, in which to be “’unusual’ is common”, that is to say, where the rule is to be true to oneself and not according to some conduct or rule of dress, behaviour and tastes. Melissa feels free there.

So, I really do feel that we have moved beyond the cusp of autobiographical comics (until the next big hit). But perhaps in the end “a mess of everything” is both a good description of Melissa’s adolescent past – a mirror of adolescence in the entire western, cosmopolitan world – and a promise to respect life as it is. When everything is a mess, all’s well. Love it and live it.