“When you first pick this one up, it’s sort of hard to look at. There is SO MUCH ART on every page.
It’s a little like looking at an R. Crumb or maybe Charles Burns picture about 1 inch from your eyeball.
But then it calms down, or maybe your brain learns the language of it, and it’s cool. So if you open it up and feel like it’s super busy, I say give it a couple dozen pages.
This is one of those books I don’t want to rate, star-wise, because it’s about abuse suffered by Glenn Head and a bunch of people he went to boarding school with. Super fucked up, and, well, I don’t know, it’s hard to rate something like that without feeling like you’re rating the act of putting such a story to paper, which takes some serious balzac.
I do appreciate that Glenn believes that the abuse he suffered has caused problems throughout his life, but he doesn’t necessarily force the reader to believe the same thing. This is like the least “woe is me” narrative with the most fucked-up shit I think I’ve ever read. The ratio of how bad things were for Glenn to how little time he seems to spend feeling sorry for himself is different than the norm for this sort of comic, and it’s a good read as a result. It just gives you a different perspective, or maybe helps a reader see that this shit hits different people differently. “