Review: ‘Blue Pills’ by Frederik Peeters
Blue Pills
By Frederik Peeters; translated by Anjali Singh
Houghton Mifflin, January 2008, $18.95
This is another one of those semi-autobiographical graphic novels; I’m not going to assume that this is all “true” (whatever that means), but I will note that Peeters’s bio says that he lives with his girlfriend, her son, and their daughter — and that [[[Blue Pills]]] is the story of a man named Fred, his girlfriend, and her son. (And the main character of this book mentions that he working on a graphic novel about their lives.) So keep that in the back of your head — some proportion of this book is true, though we don’t know how much.
Fred, the narrator of Blue Pills, is a Swiss cartoonist, still in his mid-20s, who’s lived in Geneva his whole life. He remembers Cati vividly from a pool-party late in his teens, but never really knew her well. When he moves into the apartment building where she lives, though, he comes to see more and more of her and her young son (called “the little one” or “L’il Wolf,” but not named). Before long, Fred and Cati are drifting into a relationship, and Cati has to sit Fred down and tell him something difficult — both she and her son are HIV-positive.
(The “Blue Pills” of the title refer to their drug regimen to stay symptom-free, though they’re never called that in the body of the book. The fact that most Americans will immediately think of Viagra when blue pills are mentioned is unfortunate, but neither Peeters nor Houghton Mifflin seems to have taken a moment to worry about it.)
Maxwell Jensen was the classic, small-time crook before his own idiocy transformed him into something far greater.
The doors are about to open at comic stores all over the world, taking part in 
or 
Fans of The CW’s television series 
#75. The monster gained notoriety doing what no other villain had managed to do: kill Superman. Fans later learned that Doomsday was a prehistoric Kryptonian experiment that resurrects and adapts to whatever manages to kill it. Doomsday was last seen in DC’s big 
John Gaunt is himself again in today’s brand-new episode of 
If you read fellow ComicMixologist Matt Raub’s 
, Downey Jr. offers a weird riff on his role that’s entirely new and impossible not to enjoy. Count that as a win for the film.
Born in Elkhart, Indiana in 1955, Jerry Scott initially went into advertising. He got his start in comics by submitting gag strips to magazines in the mid-1970s—and sold one of his first ones to the Saturday Evening Post.
First off, right out of the bullpen, I want to warn readers that this review of 
