Mosquito man

IN THE SUMMER of 1989, John Porcellino, a disaffected 20-year-old, went to work for his county's mosquito abatement program. Every morning, equipped only with a map, a dipper, and a sack of microbial larvicide, he escaped Chicago's northwest suburbs and investigated rural ponds, ditches, sinkholes, marshes, and discarded tires for mosquito larvae--which he'd then terminate with extreme prejudice, even glee. Though not exactly a Thoreauvian existence, Porcellino's job did lend itself to protracted contemplation, some of it depicted in his seminal, long-running zine ''King-Cat Comics and Stories."

Porcellino spent the next several years killing mosquitos in Illinois and Colorado. Now the San Francisco-based cartoonist reflects on the experience in ''Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man" (La Mano), a graphic novella collecting a dozen of his spare, parable-like memoirs from ''King-Cat."

Although ''Diary" was written as a series of anecdotes--about the loneliness of driving through suburbia late at night, and the surprises and terrors each new backyard brought--it adds up to something more. In 1995, Porcellino, viewing the world through a pickup windshield darkly, as he sprayed pesticide fog into the night air at 12 miles per hour, experienced a crisis of conscience. Over time, his outdoor work had instilled in him a sense of wonder about nature; more and more panels of his comics were devoted to the tiny miracles--wildflowers, caddis-fly larvae--he discovered while on the job. So near the end of ''Diary," when he depicts himself reading up on the Buddhist notion of ''right livelihood," we know that Porcellino's thrill-filled career as a mosquito man is, alas, about to come to an end.

''Quitting that job was a really tough decision," Porcellino said in a phone interview from San Francisco. ''It paid well, I was outside all the time, I only worked six months a year--and mosquito control programs have spared lots of people from getting infected with viruses. But not only was the work affecting my health, it was becoming ethically and spiritually difficult for me to go on doing it. Every once in a while it would dawn on me: 'Wow, I'm wiping out all these living creatures every day!'"