The Smallest Weird Number

I don't know why it's such slow-going getting through David B.'s Epileptic, a book that I would have normally breezed through in two days, tops. It has everything I love about stories like these: reality blended with fantasy, great lines on the drawings, fascinating plot. Yet I can't seem to keep my mind on it, and it doesn't make any sense why that is.

But there have been a few graphic novels that I've found myself utterly lost in, and not really caring whether or not I ever returned.

I had read nothing but astounding things about Gemma Bovery, but I somehow came to first read Posy Simmonds' most recent work Tamara Drewe and found myself quite blown away by the art, the prose, and the marvelous way that Simmonds lays out her pages. But while Tamara Drewe was based loosely on Hardy's Far From The Maddening Crowd, the protagonist in Gemma Bovery finds herself living parallel to the heroine of Madame Bovary, whether she's aware of that parallel or not.

Though the parallel is only observed by the French baker Joubert, who becomes obsessed with the British Mrs. Bovery when she and her husband move to his quaint little village in Normandy and tries to intervene to prevent what he sees is a swiftly moving momentum towards Madame Bovary's tragic ending. Gemma herself is a bored housewife who grows weary of middle-class life in London and urges her much older husband Charlie to move with her to an old fixer-upper cottage in the French countryside. Gemma fills her new home with pretentious Yuppie farm house nick-nacks that she'll never use, and soon even the allure of leisurely shopping in family-owned French bakeries drives her squirrely enough to spend more time down at the super mega-mart in the heart of town. Overweight and frumpy, and bored out of her mind, Gemma loses weight, starts shopping in chic French boutiques, and takes a young lover. The baker Joubert is beside himself with concern, knowing from the book of her namesake that none of this promises to end well.

Simmonds prose is lovely, if a bit florid at times (at least for my tastes, but it is still wonderful to read), and there are some stretches of French dialogue with no interpretation while some is provided in other spots. But Gemma Bovery is an undeniable good yarn, and you don't need to completely familiarize yourself with the original source material to follow along. A lesson in life imitating art? At least it helps restore my former faith that art (and comics) is not dead.

Although I was prepared to enjoy Gemma Bovery, I completely didn't expect to like Life Sucks, looking and sounding from the cover alone like one of those cheap attempts to capitalize on popular youth culture with cyphers (reminding me with a shudder of that appalling 90's "Gen X" picture Reality Bites). Actually I do enjoy Jessical Abel's illustrations, but in this case Abel is one of the co-authors of the book along with Gabriel Soria (Warren Pleece does the artwork this time around). Seeing it sit on the shelf for months and passing it over every single time, I finally caved in out of desperation for something to read during lunch at work and found myself pleasantly surprised.

Turns out Life Sucks is a vampire story (hence the book's title, stupid Melissa!) with a twist and an approach that I don't think I can ever recall in graphic novel form before. Starting out similar to a Clerks parody, David is a young man working the night shift at a convenience store, often visited by his pal Jerome who works nearby and hangs out to crack wise and watch the goth club in the same shopping center empty out at last call, filling the parking lot with black cloaked, plastic fanged wannabe vampires. They pour into the store, beautiful pale girls in Hot Topic fashions buying OJ made out of "blood oranges" and not even registering David and Jerome on their beautiful people-vampire radar.

Only thing is, David and his friend actually are vampires. Real creatures of the night who live how modern vampires probably would have to survive -- by earning a living at slave-wage night jobs and, in David's case, stealing blood from a blood bank to keep from having to actually kill anyone for his sustenance (David was a vegetarian before he was turned and tries to maintain that lifestyle even as a member of the undead). Despite the pretentious posing from the goth contingent, David finds himself smitten with a girl named Rosa, a beautiful and sweet Latina goth who dreams of living in the world of vampires the way she always pictured it to be in the storybooks -- lithe, pale, beautiful aristocrats whose lives can only be so much more interesting than her own. David, however, is thwarted by his nemesis Wes, a handsome blond surfer-dude alpha-vamp who has his eyes (and fangs) set on Rosa for himself. The classic plotline of the jock and the wimp vying for the attentions of a female, but with a twist. And I found myself really, really liking it. Some of the dialogue is a little forced and stilted, and contains a few pet peeves of my own (I hate when authors overuse the phrase "Shut up" when responding to a jibe) but that's my own quirk and it shouldn't deter anyone from checking this out when they get a chance. A pleasant read, and even better, the more I go back to read it again, the more nuances I find myself absorbing. Heck, just the desire to go back and read it again is endorsement enough from me. I'm the ninny who despite its superior art and wit still can't get through all of Epileptic.