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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
