Trade Rating: Jordan Crane delivers a colorful blast of fearful contemplation with GOES LIKE THIS

Goes Like This

Cartoonist: Jordan Crane
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Publication Date: April 2025

To prep for writing about Goes Like This, I revisited cartoonist Jordan Crane’s 2022 graphic novel masterpiece, Keeping Two. And after reading that book along with this new one, I was struck by a common thread — Crane is a storyteller who likes to work from the worst things he can imagine. Or at least that has been the focus of much of his cartooning. It was certainly on display in Keeping Two, which is ostensibly about the death of one’s significant other, about imagining it, visualizing it, processing it, and so on. And it comes back again in some of the pieces in Goes Like This, which were published in various places over the course of the past 25 years.

I say some because Goes Like This is a collection of short comics stories and prints. It’s a relatively big book, especially compared to how compact Keeping Two was, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. The cover (see above) is evocative of a sort of translucent, lightly muted neon. And it looks even better when you see the physical book.

The book design is also ambitious in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before. The spine of this book has the letters appearing over the bound pages, as if the actual spine has been ripped clean off. You can also feel the binding. It’s as if the book once had a standard, familiar spine — and it was cut off with a paper cutter. And then the title of the book was printed over it. It’s very cool, and I dug it. The paper stock here is also varied, and there isn’t a single page that wasn’t designed and designed well.

Goes Like This also has an aesthetic vibe — which reads as messy but I suspect was carefully-considered and precise — that continues on through the book’s interior pages, too. The prints in Goes Like This look great, and I enjoyed how they both broke up the stories and also served as a sort of palette cleanser. Collections of prose stories don’t really need to do much to separate individual pieces. A little bit of white space and a new title header gets the job done. It’s a lot tougher in comics. You can do a framing device, or find another way to break them up, like the prints do here. Otherwise you run the risk of stories feeling like they bump into each other. The full-page prints in this book are also stunning and varied too, sometimes connecting directly or thematically to the material, and sometimes just looking awesome.

As a result, this feels like a substantial book, both in its actual physical heft and in the material it tackles. There’s a western story here about the consequences of violent actions. There’s an angsty teen ghost story that feels like a close cousin of what would eventually become Keeping Two. And there’s a mournful, lonely sci-fi story about deep space mining going awry. Among many other motifs, too. 

It’s an usually varied anthology in terms of the genres it works within, which to me is a plus and guards against the book ever feeling too same-y, even when the themes start to feel familiar. There’s a sense of compulsive readability to Goes Like This, because what’s coming next is often a surprise. And the stories are all well-drawn. There’s not a bad-looking one in the bunch. 

Here and there I did find myself able to guess where some of the stories were headed. I knew the emotional beats a couple of them were likely to end on, but it didn’t really effect my enjoyment of the book in any serious way because of how much I enjoyed the overall experience of reading. While it’s a very different project than Keeping Two — it is perhaps Crane at his most maximal while Keeping Two kept things minimal — I think fans of Crane and his other work will enjoy this book quite a bit. And if you’ve read some of these stories in the past, this is a wonderful chance to get them all together in a book you can easily display or even keep out on your coffee table.

Goes Like This is now available from Fantagraphics and other book sellers

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