Author: Andrew Wheeler

Sharky Malarkey: A Sketchshark Collection by Megan Nicole Dong

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As far as I can tell, this 2018 book is the only collection of the “Sketchshark” comic – more than that, it’s creator Megan Nicole Dong’s only book to date, and “Sketchshark” was the title of her (long-abandoned) Blogspot site and maybe the original title of the (only mildly abandoned) related Tumblr , which now uses the book’s title.

On the other hand, she’s got a day-job in animation as a director and storyboard artist (including what looks like three shows this decade, one upcoming for 2027), which probably takes most of her artistic energy and drawing time the last bunch of years.

Sharky Malarkey  feels like one of those “throw in everything to fill up a book” collections, divided into chapters with somewhat different kinds of cartoons. There’s a twenty-page introduction, which I think was new for the book, in which the creator is picked up for a rideshare by her shark character (Bruce), incorporating what may have been a few separate individual strips about Dong’s life and cat. That’s the only major autobio material; Dong doesn’t seem to be the kind of creator who wants to talk about herself.

The first chapter, Malarky, has a bunch of general cartoons  – people on phones, anxiety issues, other life issues and relatable content, and a bunch of comics about butts. (Millennial cartoonists cartoon as much about butts as Boomer-era cartoonists did about tits – though the millennials are more gender-balanced, both the cartoonists and the butts they draw.)

Then we get the Bruce-centric chapter, There’s a Shark in Los Angeles. Bruce is shallow, self-obsessed, and a minor celebrity (at least in his own head). The fact that he is in Los Angeles is definitely not random, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Dong started doing this character when she began looking for work in Hollywood. (The book includes some pieces – older, I assume – in which the main character is still in art school, too.)

Next up is Ladythings, which somewhat heads back to the general humor of the first chapter – but focused on physical or cultural issues that are female-coded. (Often in weird ways, because Dong is a cartoonist and they have goofy ideas; there’s a short sequence about prehensile boobs, for example.)

Then comes The Animal + Plants Channel, which is pretty random. For most cartoonists, a chapter about animals would imply pets – dogs and/or cats, depending – but Dong’s work is wilder than that, with a lot of squirrels and horses, plus whales and a few returns of Bruce. And, yes, there are strips about plants as well.

Fifth is A Toad Makes New Friends in the Forest, which starts out as a picture-book-style story and morphs over into more traditional comics as it goes. It’s also an unsubtle racial allegory, and runs into the final section, Some Sort of End, in which Bruce returns for one last time to lead the big kids-movie all-singing, all-dancing ending. (Dong spent most of the first decade of her career making animation for kids – I’m not sure she’s entirely moved beyond that now – and is deeply familiar with the story beats and particular bits of laziness of that genre.)

Dong has an organic, appealing style, with bright colors enclosed by confident black lines all basically the same weight. And her humor is quirky and specific – the jokes and ideas and setups in Sharky Malarkey aren’t derivative, or ever obvious. It would be nice if she had time and energy and enthusiasm to make more comics like this, since her work is so distinctive, but it looks like animation has been taking her creative energy since the book came out – and probably paying much better. But time is long and Hollywood is fickle; who knows what will happen next? Maybe she’ll make more cartoons and be a massive success at something unexpected. 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings by J.L. Westover

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I like to link to webcomics when I can, though these days, it’s weirdly difficult. A lot of creators seem to just post on their normal social media, since that’s where all of the algorithm-driven traffic goes anyway, and running an ad-supported site is basically a hellscape mostly left to the hardy souls who have been doing it for twenty years and have built up calluses in the right places.

So I’m going to talk about Mr. Lovenstein , and that Tapas link seems to be reasonably relevant. But I have no idea if that’s the real home of the strip currently, or if you should just follow the creator, J.L. Westover, on Instagram or somewhere.

The good news is that the Mr. Lovenstein strip is being collected into books, which are slightly easier to point to. (Still: digital or print? Local store or chain or Internet behemoth? As usual, I pick the link that’s most convenient to me.) And one of them is what I just read: Mr. Lovenstein Presents: Feelings , published last fall by the Skybound arm of the mighty Image comics empire. (There was a time when I could remember which Image studio was connected with which original creator, but that was over twenty years ago. I dunno what else Skybound does these days, but, from the indicia, it seems to be the Robert Kirkman shop.)

This is another one of those roughly-ubiquitous strips: you’ve seen Westover’s brightly-colored lumpy figures (and the occasional animal) on the Internet here and there, shared by random contacts and friends, even if you’ve never made an effort to read the strip itself. (I never did, until this book.)

Westover is a generation or so younger than me, so I don’t know if he meant his characters to visually rhyme with the old Mr. Men and Little Miss books for kids. (And other readers might disagree that there’s that much visual similarity, but it seems pretty obvious to me.)  They are cartoony, with fat rounded lines and simplified features – the kind of precise cartooning that looks simple but is unforgiving, where every line needs to be just right. And his comics are all individual gags, with some recurring styles of characters but no obvious continuing characters. These were Internet comics, so they all have “bonus panels” – have to get people to click through to the actual home of the strip – one or two additional, black and white, beats after the main (usually color) three or four-panel comic. Bonus panel comics have an odd rhythm, like a newspaper strip that always has its main punchline in panel 3 and a muted follow-up at the end, but adding jokes to a book of jokes is generally a good thing, so I won’t complain about it more.

This particular collection focuses, as the title says, on feelings – and, in the Mr. Lovenstein context (and just a general funny-comics context) that means big feelings: crying, being upset by the world or by specific things, the desire to be loved and appreciated, some actual love or affection but not much, and a tiny little bit of actual happiness. Westover’s characters are tormented and unhappy, most of the time, but in funny ways, and ways I think are relatable, especially to people closer to his age than mine.

I find the concept of doing themed collections of a webcomic a little gimmicky – the previous Mr. Lovenstein collection was Failure, and it looks like they’ll continue in that vein – but I also remember legions of Garfield Eats Lasagna and Peanuts Baseball Gags and Jeffy Wanders Aimlessly Through the Neighborhood books, so it’s not a new thing, or an unreasonable thing, or a surprising thing. It’s just a little gimmicky, and sometimes you need a gimmick to stand out.

Mr. Lovenstein is, from the comics collected here, more emotionally honest than many gag strips – in that these-young-people-are-always-talking-about-their-mental-health way some people my age like to complain about incessantly – and it’s also pretty funny a lot of the time. And Westover is a fine cartoonist.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Mechaboys by James Kochalka

I’ve said this before – multiple times – but a reading life goes through various odd turns and stages. Creators that you think of as being current favorites can have multiple books that you expect to get to “later,” are for different audiences, or that you just never see.

And suddenly you realize it’s been a decade since you read a James Kochalka graphic novel.

When my kids were younger, I read a bunch of his books for kids – with and to them, or passed on to them after – but that petered out when they were in their mid-teens; Kochalka’s books for younger readers tended (at least then; we’ve just established I’m thoroughly outdated on his current career) to the younger end. And I read his American Elf diary comics, until those ended. (In fact, the last Kochalka book I covered here was the collection of the earliest American Elf strips.)

So when I saw a Kochalka book in my library app – one for teens, mostly, rather than little kids – I decided a decade was already too long to go without Kochalka.

Mechaboys  is tonally closer to Superf*ckers than to the kid books, though even his work for little kids gets a bit snotty and rude – Kochalka, I think, is an old-school punk, and his characters are brash and pushy and in-your-face no matter what the story. It’s the story of two high school seniors, Zachery (who wants to be called Zeus) and Jamie (who wants to be called James). They just built a mech suit in their garage – Zachery is living with Jamie and his widowed mom for not-entirely-specified problems-with-his-family reasons – out of what seems to mostly be an old lawnmower.

Because this is a Kochalka comic, the mech suit basically works – it makes the wearer bigger and stronger and tougher, though it does need to be started with a pullstring, because former lawnmower.

Our heroes are bullied in school – well, some jock-types pick on them for being weird and different, but it’s fairly low-key for bullying in a graphic novel for teens. The jocks are jerks rather than assholes, basically: just about as thoughtless and impulsive and destructive as our heroes, only in different ways. Still, it’s a huge pain for the guys, and they want to get even or win out or whatever – all those outsider “we’ll show them” ideas.

The mech suit has multiple outings: crashing into a car, visiting a keg party at Booger’s Hollow, and eventually disrupting the prom. But things don’t go quite the ways either Zachery – the more alienated and angry and violent of the two – or Jamie – who thinks a girl in their class might like him, and wants to figure that out – expect. There are fights, including a huge mostly joyful free-for-all at the prom at the end. 

This is a quick, fun story that takes unexpected twists all the time, in Kochalka’s mature cartooning style, all rubber-hose characters with rounded organic black lines. It reminded me how much fun Kochalka’s work is, and how I really shouldn’t have gone without it for so long.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Bogart Creek, Vol.2 by Derk Evernden

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Bogart Creek may be yet another thing I discovered only after it ended; it looks like creator Derek Evernden stopped posting it on Instagram and Reddit a year or so ago. On the other hand, he’s published three books, the website is still there, and there’s a Patreon , so maybe he just managed to paywall it and actually make some money from his cartooning.

(As you know {Bob}, cartoonists used to be able to get publications to pay for their cartoons regularly – many of them making decent livings and a few making actual fortunes. Since techbros demolished print media and advertising, replacing them with outlets that only bring profit to them, cartoonists have found that making any income from drawing funny pictures has been much more complicated and difficult – much like everything else the techbros touch.)

Bogart Creek, Vol.2  is the middle of the three books to date, published in early 2021, a little more than a year after the first book . And, like I said the first time, it’s a single-panel comic in the Far Side mold, with no recurring characters or themes. It is cheerfully gory, mostly dark humor with lots of severed limbs, murderous folks (both crazed killers and gangsters, as on facing pages as I’m poking through for examples as I write this), sharks, aliens, and media references.

Now, I don’t want to oversell the darkness – it’s probably only about a quarter of the strips that feature a murder or other violent death, and, in many of those cases, the violent death hasn’t quite happened at the moment of the strip. But there’s no fluffy bunnies frolicking happily in a field – the lighter jokes are the media references and amusing wordplay and funny juxtapositions. And Evernden draws a bloody splat, or those severed limbs, a lot more often than most cartoonists – even the supposedly “dark” ones.

I like this stuff, and I think people who enjoy dark single panels will agree with me. The cover shows his visual inventiveness pretty well – that’s the caliber of his non-gory gags, and the gory ones are equally well constructed but substantially darker. If that sounds appealing, there’s three books of his work available, plus a fair bit floating around online for free as a teaser.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

What If We Were… by Axelle Lenoir

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I have to start, as usual, with my biggest criticism, and get it out of the way. I’m sorry to slam Axelle Lenoir and her publishing team so hard, but it has to be said.

What If We Were…  only has a three-period ellipsis in its title. This is wrong. When an ellipsis ends a sentence, it needs to have four periods. I am incredibly disappointed at this major, unforgivable mistake.

This book collects what I think were forty or fifty individual strips – the main story seems to be in two-page entries, but there’s also interstitial material that might have been attached to the stories, added for this book, or maybe the alternate version in every other issue – that appeared in Quebec’s teen-focused magazine Curium  in French. From the copyright page, I think a version of this collection then appeared in book form in Quebecois French, from Front Froid, and then this edition came out in 2020, from Top Shelf, translated by Pablo Strauss and Aleshia Jensen. It is the first of two books collecting this strip; I have no idea if that’s the whole run or not.

Marie and Natalie are teens, best friends who have played the title game since they were little kids. One of them has a premise – what if the two of them were Vikings, or superheroines, or world-famous scientists, or whatever – and they both riff on the idea. The strip is about their friendship, using the game as a regular (but not required) element to show how they relate to each other and what they care about. Oh, and Natalie has a crush on another girl they go to school with – first unnamed, then called “Jane Doe”…which somehow turns into her actual name over the course of the strip.

Jane does become the third major character during these strips, first having that very teenager-y  circumlocutious conversation with Marie to ask if Natalie 1) likes girls and 2) likes her. Since Natalie does and definitely does, Jane starts circling the outer orbit of the strip about a third of the way into this book, gradually getting more and more central until the two of them actually have a date.

This is very much a story about teenagers, originally for teenagers. It has that nervous, insecure-in-its-own-skin energy of the teen, the sense that all of the world is new and overwhelming and awesome but also deeply scary. Marie and Natalie are interesting, quirky, real people with foibles and distinct personalities – Jane is a bit more of a plot token, especially early on, but she does get somewhat more depth once she’s in the strip more.

What If We Were… is fun and zippy – it’s clearly a collection of a loose serial, and equally clearly a work for teens (especially French-speaking teen girls in Canada, which may be a bit too far away from some readers’ experience), and definitely not as ambitious and impressive as Lenoir’s big graphic novel Secret Passages . But Lenoir has an infectious energy in her drawing and her dialogue is always specific and grounded – this is a story about these people and what they care and think about.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Macanudo: The Way of the Penguin by Liniers

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This third collection of the Macanudo daily strip – by the Argentinian cartoonist known as Liniers – is in the same style and closely follows the first two books, Welcome to Elsewhere and Optimism Is For the Brave . So, normally, I would struggle to say something different here, when the underlying work is the same kind of thing – more penguins, elves, Olga and her boy, Henrietta and her cat, two witches, Mysterious Man in Black, and so forth.

But I read this book two weeks ago, before a major vacation (my first getaway vacation in about five years), so I would already struggle to remember or think of things to write about it. And having a built-in excuse that comes with links to two long posts about basically exactly the material in this book gives me the warm and fuzzies, this morning when a major snowstorm threatens to drop six or more inches later in the day.

All that is to say: this post about Macanudo: The Way of the Penguin  will be short and vague. Jump into those links above for a lot more about Liniers, his thoughtful comic strip Macanudo, and all of the various (mostly separate) casts that appear in it.

Way of the Penguin was published in mid-December; I read it at the end of January. It’s still essentially brand-new, as you read this. Macanudo is – not quite paradoxically, but something in that territory – both one of the most positive and one of the most intellectual strips out there. Linier’s characters read serious books and think serious thoughts…though often in silly ways. They engage with the physical and the intellectual world without excuse or minimizing. And they’re also almost always happy and energetic, no matter what they’re doing or what odd landscape they’re traipsing through. (Even the witches, who are most likely to encounter townspeople with torches and those Frankenstein rakes, are at worst bemused by it.)

Again: this strip was fully-formed and mature before it even appeared in the English language in the US in 2018; Liniers had been doing it in Spanish for an Argentinian audience since 2002. His art is soft and organic – it looks like watercolors, or maybe colored pencils over ink, to my eye (though, knowing the little I do about the coloring of newspaper strips, I don’t know if that can actually be the case). This is often billed as an modern version of Calvin and Hobbes, since it also has a couple of imaginative children in prominent roles, but Macanudo is more centrally about major (I don’t want to say “adult”) ideas and thoughts. It has plenty of whimsy, but not the same kind of whimsy – there’s an underlying regard for knowledge and truth and understanding here.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Sartre by Mathilde Ramadier and Anais Depommier

Most books like this have a subtitle, but not this one. It is just Sartre . Take him as he is, or walk away – those are your options with the book, as it is with all things Sartrean.

This is a French graphic novel, written by Mathilde Ramadier and drawn by Anais Depommier. And I immediately have to take back what I just said – maybe it’s a subtle difference between how English-speakers view Sartre and how his countrymen do – because the 2015 Dargaud edition had the longer, more descriptive title Sartre, Une existence, des libertés. This 2017 US edition was translated by Peter Russella and published by NBM.

It is a biography in comics form of the writer and philosopher – straightforward and chronological, starting with his youth and ending the main story in 1964 when he refused the Nobel Prize. (Sartre consistently refused all prizes and awards in his life as part of his philosophy: he thought that a person could always change at any point, so judging anyone before they were dead was impossible. I am probably mangling his argument here.)

Actually, it nearly becomes a twinned biography – Simone de Beauvoir is almost as important to the book as Sartre is himself, as she was in his life. We even get her words in captions, as we do Sartre’s, a few times throughout this book. (One minor production note: their captions are tinted to distinguish them from the white-background captions, which are the books’ narrative. I found, reading this digitally, that those captions were scattered enough that the color difference wasn’t clear – though they tend to be used for scenes of either Sartre or de Beauvoir away from the other, so they’re always clear in context.)

For a man who lived through WWII in Paris and was at least nominally part of the Resistance to German occupation, Sartre led a quiet, sedentary, bookish life. The thrills of this graphic novel are primarily intellectual, the conflicts inter-personal and brought out in long complex conversations in drawing rooms over fine food and between cigarettes. It’s a very wordy book, as I suppose it had to be – Sartre was a man of words, more so than even most writers.

Ramadier and Depommier don’t focus on the many sexual adventures of Sartre and de Beauvoir, though they do have a few moments to indicate they are happening (continuously, all the time, in the background of the intellectual activity) and also show the beginning of their relationship with a frank in-bed conversation in which Sartre says (this is my blunt translation out of Sartre-speak) “I want to fuck a lot of people, and I think you do, too – but let’s always come back to each other and tell each other about it, to stay the most important people to each other.”

This is a book full of words, and I have to credit both Ramadier for making it all work in the first place and Russella for turning it into clear English that fits into the panels and tells (what I have to assume is) the same story. It is not an exciting book, and it will be deeper and more interesting the more a reader is familiar with Sartre’s life, thought, and major works, but it’s a solid introduction even to people who only vaguely know who Sartre was or why he matters. 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts by Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is one of the premier book designers of our day, and a big proponent of comics as an art form. He also has a tendency to get…let me say “fussy”…in his designs – he came of professional age in the go-go Nineties, and that can be seen in his work sometimes. He also seems to be fascinated by the physicality of original art, and I’ve occasionally complained that tendency is not a good match for books that mean to reprint stories.

Art books want to show art, as clearly as possible, shot from the originals – it should mimic the experience of visiting a gallery. But most books with comics in them are not art books – they’re books for reading those comics. And, so, most of the time, versions of the art where you can see the color of the underlying paper or blue lines or lumps of Wite-Out or erasures are not what the audience wants or needs.

The good news is that this book here is an art book, which means Kidd’s instincts and strengths are perfectly aligned with the purpose of the book. (See up top, for the original cover of the book, as an example of what Kidd does when he has his head. The current cover of the book – much more conventional, and much more useful for anyone trying to figure out what it is, is below.)

You can see the color of the underlying paper and some tracing lines and big swoops of Wite-Out and some erasures and loose sketches in Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts  – and that’s the point of the book. It’s a sampling of the collection of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, and the purpose is to show a much larger audience what it would be like to visit that museum and see a whole bunch of Peanuts originals and other Schulz drawings, full-size, up on walls with good light.

Only What’s Necessary has a lot of words up front, mostly about how wonderful Schulz was and how awesome his museum is now. I assume anyone reading this book will already believe all of that, but I suppose a book does need to have words in it, and these are appropriate. Contributors include Jean Schulz, the artist’s widow and head of that museum, Jeff Kinney, the “Wimpy Kid” creator, and Paige Braddock, cartoonist and creative head of the arm of the Schulz media empire that manages licensed properties (and, way back at the beginning of her tenure, the strip itself).

But the main purpose of the book is not the words – or, at least, not the words by other people. We do want to see Schulz’s captions and dialogue, and to try to untangle his crabbed script on sketches. (Though I have to admit I had very little luck at that.) The art was photographed by Geoff Spear, who has worked with Kidd on a lot of these projects. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t get noticed much by readers like me (maybe like you, too), but the art is crisp and clear, and all of those artifacts of drawing are as clear in the photos as I can imagine them being.

Kidd doesn’t have a formal organizational principle for the book – it’s roughly chronological by phases of Schulz’s career, which is all it needs. The focus is mostly on the strips themselves, as it should be, but there’s a lot of ancillary materials – comic books and magazine covers, games and toys – as well as abandoned strips, a few early drawings, and just a couple basically complete strips that never made it into newspapers.

So this is a book with a lot of impressive Schulz art in it, presented well and often blown up to make it easier to see the little details. I probably didn’t take as much time lingering over every page as some readers would, but I enjoyed it a lot, and was reminded yet again of the paradoxical truth of cartooning: it’s harder to make fewer lines; the simplest drawings are the most focused and precise.

You need to be seriously interested in a creator to go for an art book of their work – otherwise you just read the work. But if you’ve dug into a lot of Peanuts, and in particular if you like the way Schulz drew and would like to draw more like that yourself, this is a book with a lot of examples and (potentially) lessons to teach.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch by Guy Colwell

I find myself staring at this blank page, either unsure of what to say or not actually having anything to say. (I’m also writing this one on Christmas morning, which is its own issue.) So I’ll try being short and factual, and see if that gives me a way in.

Delights  was Guy Colwell’s new graphic novel this year – his first work created as a single book, as well. I knew his name from Doll (which I saw once or twice, I think, but never read seriously), but he was an underground cartoonist (both as a creator of comics and as a colorist/editorial worker on other people’s comics) for a few decades and a painter as well. He’s in his seventies now; he was part of the main wave of the undergrounds, which means he’s a Boomer, born in 1945.

This is a historical story, fictionalized since the details aren’t known but aiming to be realistic or plausible – this is how Colwell thinks things probably happened, mostly, or that it’s most interesting for him to postulate how it happened.

The main character is the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (real name Jheronimus van Aken), and it’s about the year or so when he was working on his most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

In Colwell’s telling, Bosch was a visionary painter – literally, in that he saw visions of the strange creatures that populated especially his paintings of Hell – and that he was somewhat concerned about being pious and true to his religion, but even more concerned about propriety and not being seen by his neighbors as heretical or transgressive. This painting was commissioned by a local duke and his heir, and their agent (another painter) continually pushed Bosch during the preparation to be more fleshy and earthly in the painting – more nudes, more varied nudes, more activity, more titillation for the noble audience that would enjoy it.

Bosch worried about scandal as he sketched various permutations of naked people in his studio for months on end, and tried to keep them quiet form the local town – the models were mostly sent by his patron, being retainers or servants or whatever.

That’s what the book is about: Bosch doing the work, and worrying about the work as he does it. Being pushed by his patrons in one direction, and then – in a major scene Colwell admits is entirely invented, but based on concerns that arose much later, when the painting was in Madrid and Bosch was dead – being pushed in the opposite direction by a representative of the much diminished but still potentially dangerous Inquisition.

It’s a story about making art, on a scale and with a scope that clearly appeals to a maker of comics. A big painting – Garden is a tryptch, six feet tall and almost twice that wide – that takes a year to paint is not a million miles away from a graphic novel, say one of about 160 pages like Delights. Making something like that is not a single action, but sustained work over a long period of time – and art about painters often struggles with depicting the length of time it takes to make a painting, preferring to assume major works can be done in a day from a live model.

Colwell doesn’t overdramatize the conflicts; they’re mostly internal to Bosch himself, or worked out in conversations with his wife and models and patrons and neighbors and assistant. (Or, a couple of times, with the visions he sees, which talk back to him.) So Delights is mostly a quiet book, about a long period of sustained work. Colwell’s art reinforces that: his lines are precise and fine, his faces and especially gestures feel more medieval than modern – a major benefit for this work – and his tone quiet and contemplative throughout.

Delights is not really a book to love; it’s one to think about, to let simmer, to enjoy quietly and then go look at the painting it’s about. It’s a book to make you look at another work of art, to stare at it in depth, and think hard about what you see and what it all means. In a very real sense, it’s a guide to appreciating The Garden of Earthly Delights, in an unexpected format.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy by Faith Erin Hicks

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Sometimes working titles survive everything the book-production process can throw at them. The new project comes in with a title everyone assumes will be replaced, eventually, by something better, but then the whole team gets used to it, every new option is shot down for various reasons, and the placeholder title seems OK by comparison.

Maybe not just OK – it’s the way everyone is thinking about the book.

And, eventually, the cover has to be designed and the placeholder title is put in type, and, gosh! it looks just fine there, so whaddayaknow: that’s the actual title.

I don’t know that happened with Faith Erin Hicks’ 2023 graphic novel Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy . But it’s the style of title that makes me very suspicious.

This is a teen romance drama, heavier on the teen drama than the romance, which is mostly light and casual. Our central character, as implied in the title, is Alix, the star player on her teen hockey team on Vancouver Island.

Alix is a loner and not good at social interactions. She also seems to be about six feet tall and pretty muscular; we think that has a lot to do with it. (She’s big even on her hockey team.) But probably more pertinently, she’s been bullied by her team captain Lindsay, for what seems like years – and the other players quietly let it happen, so Lindsay doesn’t focus on them.

(The unwritten story here is how horrible their coach is: she sees and allows this behavior from the team captain because, apparently, the team wins consistently. I don’t know about legal requirements in Canada, but, where I live, the coach would be a mandated reporter and could – wait, I mean should – lose her job for turning a blind eye to such toxic behavior.)

Anyway, after one game at the very beginning of this book, Lindsay goes off on a tirade against Alix – how she’s no good at anything except hockey, will never have a boyfriend, is the worst person ever, that kind of thing – and Alix just hauls off and socks her.

Now, I have never been a teenage girl. But in my years as a teenage boy, when similar things happened, – and they happened quite a lot – both participants would be disciplined, for slightly different reasons, and told nothing like that could ever happen again.

But in Canada, in the year 2023, among young women, in this book at least, it’s all Alix’s fault, and the coach pulls her into an office to ask seriously why this happened and “where this violence came from.” Um, one – hockey, and two – sustained endemic bullying from an authority figure! This is not actually difficult for a coach who has any idea what she is doing…which this one clearly does not.

This is our plot. Alix, who had one completely understandable and long-overdue moment of rage, needs to learn to control her anger. And her coach, having no professional skills in this as in everything else in her purview, leaves Alix to figure out something on her own as a seventeen-year-old, instead of referring her to a counselor or booking her into the league anger-management group or anything else serious and constructive that a coach with actual resources would have done.

Alix instead goes to school the next day, where she sees a classmate, Ezra, facing down his own bully, Greg – who, in the overdetermined world of high-school drama, is also Lindsay’s boyfriend, though this plot point doesn’t really become important – through words. So she, in her clumsy-galoot way, asks Ezra to teach her not to hit people when they bully her, which, again, she apparently has only done once in her life in the first place.

Ezra, one of the Drama People who are eternally at war with the Jocks, as told in legends and ’80s movies since time immemorial, agrees to this random weird request from a gigantic girl he’s never really interacted with. And they start hanging out, since Ezra doesn’t have an anger-management course or specific lessons he can just tell her to begin with.

Ezra’s friends run the gamut of mildly supportive to strongly opposed: how dare he spend any time with someone who is regularly in physical vicinity to bullies like Lindsay and Greg?

Oh! And also, everyone at school thinks Ezra is gay, since he’s only dated boys in highschool. (He’s actually one of these modern “I don’t want to put labels on it” kind of person who is not “bisexsual” even though he admits he’s attracted to both boys and girls – and, we the readers think, any other kind of person he meets, probably.)

Alix starts developing a crush on Ezra, thinking it’s impossible. Ezra is the kind of bisexual totally unique unlabel-able teenage sex-god-thing who wants everyone to live and/or love him. They are both dramatic in their own ways, because they are teenagers and it comes with the territory.

There’s also an undercurrent of “what do you want to do with your life, and do your parents approve?” Both Alix and Ezra have been raised by single mothers with dramatic backstories – Alix’s mom is a “Canadian-famous” sculptor who went strongly against her own parents’ wishes to go into the arts and whose husband ran away sometime after Alix’s birth to play hockey in the States and apparently has had no contact since; Ezra’s mom was abused by his father until ten-year-old Ezra stood up to him with a knife and drove him out of the house.

Consequently, Alix’s mom is strongly anti-hockey, and doesn’t see the flashing, direct, incredibly obvious parallels between her parents’ “it would be crazy for my teen daughter to work so hard on this thing with a very low chance of career success!” arguments and hers. And Ezra is cold to his mother’s boyfriend, a perfectly nice guy who seems to have been around for a while and plans to stick around permanently.

Like I said: more drama than romance. Alix and Ezra do eventually work out the “he’d be more than happy to kiss her, too” thing, and they do kiss and hold hands. But the plot-driven Dramatic Stuff takes up most of the book.

I found it a bit overstuffed: there’s too many bits of drama, which proliferate as the book goes on, and there’s not quite enough space to let it all breathe naturally. A number of things are suspiciously convenient – such as Alix’s father’s location and the ease of contacting him – when they need to be, and adult reactions also seem to be carefully calibrated to keep the drama running on the right track to the ending Hicks wants.

So my sense is that Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy wanted to be bigger than it was – maybe two books, one mostly Hockey Girl to start and a concluding volume mostly Drama Boy. It all works as it is – Hicks is an old hand at this, and tells stories well – but there’s more material here than quite fits comfortably into the package.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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