Not for kids, though adult readers should take some pleasure knowing that they’re better off than Matt, at least as depicted...
The cartoonist tests the limits of pathetic self-absorption in a volume that should appeal to his cult following but is unlikely to expand it.
The work of graphic-diarist Matt (Peepshow, 2003) is practically review-proof, for any criticism one could make he has already flagellated upon himself. His obsessive focus remains the life of Matt, though even he questions why anyone else could possibly be interested. He’s geeky (at least within these drawings) even by the standards of his fellow geek-comics, who are the closest thing he has to friends, though they spend most of their time together either criticizing or ridiculing him. During the mid-1990s, as detailed in these panels, he lives in a Toronto flophouse with a shared bathroom (which he generally avoids in favor of a bottle in his bedroom). He’s consumed with his collection of bootleg pornography, which he has painstakingly edited into marathon video anthologies of the “good” parts. He masturbates eight or ten times a day, leaving less time, energy and inspiration (as the title suggests) for the graphic narratives that barely earn him a living. Fortunately, for a man of meager income, he’s notoriously cheap. He laments the girlfriend he lost and wishes he had another, though he’s unsure whether such flesh-and-blood complications would be worth sacrificing his porn collection. On video, he favors submissive Asian women; out the window, he fixates on schoolgirl uniforms and wonders whether he might be a pedophile. Interspersed with ruminations on Matt’s tawdry adult existence are flashbacks to his Pennsylvania boyhood that provide some clues as to how he ended up this way. The spirit of the underground era lives in these comics, which make no attempt at graphic-novel respectability.
Not for kids, though adult readers should take some pleasure knowing that they’re better off than Matt, at least as depicted here.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-897299-11-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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