We’ve talked a lot about mental illness and Homeland here, and as a corollary (and possible pick-me-up), I wanted to recommend Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover‘s Gingerbread Girl.

The short graphic novel follows Annah Billups, a 26 year old who insists that she has a missing sister. And not just any sister: her Penfield homunculus, which she says her father removed from her brain during her parents divorce, grew into a full-sized sister for her, and who subsequently appeared, only to seem to be avoiding Annah in the city where she lives and loves. As a result of that surgery and loss, Annah claims to feel things less, both physically and emotionally, an excuse for her to behave less than admirably. She schedules two dates for a single night and goes out with the woman who shows up first, is sexually manipulative, and often generally inconsiderate. But she’s still charming and compelling: damage is not incompatible with charisma, and in fact, the two can go together quite handily.

So is Annah insane? It’s never clarified: a Penfield homunculus is, of course, a way of illustrating brain functions rather than a real thing. But the story of her missing sister Annah has a certain magical quality to it that’s a lovely representation of the divorce from self. Annah wants to feel normal and whole again, but Ginger doesn’t want to see her, she dashes around corners and runs out of stores. And while Homeland gives us a Cassandra rendered explicable and admirable to us even as she’s stigmatized by the people around her on-screen, Gingerbread Girl is told significantly from the perspective of the people Annah hurts and loves, from the people (and in several cases animals) she encounters along the way, who are more inclined to be charitable with her than we might be.

It’s also a good way of illustrating the challenges of treatment. It’s one thing to massively reset your brain with ECT therapy. It’s another to have a problem that’s magical rather than scientific. We’re making advances in brain science, but we’re still not far enough along for true cures to depression and dementia, as in Rise of the Planet of the Apes to seem like the provenance of fantasy or science fiction.

When Chris Hayes tweeted that Darrell Hammond’s interview with Terry Gross was “almost too much to bear,” I honestly thought he might be exaggerating. But he’s right. Hammond’s incredibly brave and forthright about what it’s like to live as a survivor of what sounds like insanely traumatic abuse and to work at a very high level while struggling with the mental illness caused by that abuse. And his description of his cutting is precise and painful — and should put to lie the idea that something that’s all too often dismissed as overdramatic acting out by teenage girls is either minor or confined to women:

HAMMOND: I don’t know if I can describe it any better than that. I mean, I was disoriented and frightened, and I was feeling every single thing that happened to me – you know, when I was in the kitchen once with my mother. And I’m not a doctor, so I can’t describe what flashbacks are as well as, perhaps, they can, but it is like you’re living it again.

So if you make a small cut, it creates a new and more manageable crisis than the one that currently has you lying on the…

GROSS: Let me stop there. You’re talking about cutting yourself …

HAMMOND: Yeah.

GROSS: ..with a razor.

HAMMOND: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: So I interrupted you. You’re saying it does what?

HAMMOND: Well, it creates a smaller, more manageable crisis than the one that has you gripping the carpet.

GROSS: So like, the physical pain distracts you from the mental agony?

HAMMOND: I think so. I think that might be a fair assessment of it, yeah.

GROSS: So you take out a razor and start cutting your…

HAMMOND: I don’t start. It’s just a little (makes noise) – just enough to, you know, draw red and create a crisis that’s manageable, you know.

GROSS: So are you concerned at that moment, what if I bleed onstage?

HAMMOND: No, I mean…

GROSS: In the practical realm.

HAMMOND: No, at that point, I’ve been doing that since I was 19 years old. So I’m pretty good at managing it.

GROSS: So that you don’t really show blood?

HAMMOND: Not through my clothes. I mean, it’s easily bandaged.

Wilfred, which premiered on FX last night, strikes me as an odd combination of Harvey, Pineapple Express, Donnie Darko, and…maybe Old School, or some other movie in which a fussy and neurotic male protagonist is at least temporarily liberated by acting wildly out of control. I tuned in because I’m interested in the trend of unmotivated male protagonists, and I wanted to see if the show had something new to say in that vein.

It does, in that Elijah Wood’s Ryan is clearly established as depressed, rather than simply a slacker. We first meet him printing out a suicide note (clearly labeled as the third revision of said missive) and looking like Frodo post-Mount Doom but pre-Valinor, as if maybe he had gotten a haircut and was still trying to hack it in the Shire as a gainfully employed hobbit. The problem is, we don’t really have a clear idea of why Ryan’s so depressed, why he’s so terrible to the sister who is trying to help him find a job, or what dreadful thing he’s been through to make hanging out with a horny, scatological, pot-smoking personified dog look like a better alternative to figuring out how to be a plausible adult.

The thing that makes the show work for me to the extent that it does is that the show seems aware of its own untenable premise. “Wilfred, how is this going to end?” Ryan asks his new dog friend after a day of smoking weed, humping waitresses (“Do you always feed your dog nachos?” “No, but he worked out today.”), stealing a closet’s worth of cannabis plants, and defecating in their neighbor’s boots. But some of the crassness of the show just feels like it’s reaching, like when Ryan’s sister declares of a delivery she performed earlier in the day “She wasn’t Asian American, Ryan. She was real Asian. I had to do so much slicing and dicing down there, it looks like a goddamn Benihana.” Wilfred probably shouldn’t try to be Louie, since I’m not sure it has a sense of the truths it wants to tell in the same way Louis C.K. does. It’s better at the moments when it’s more genuinely strange, like when Wilfred gets anxious about whether his real owner will come to reclaim him, and when the show emphasizes his non-humanness. Whether it can make that oddness a strength, rather than falling into derivative weakness, remains an open question.