Looking For a Good Book

**WARNING — GRAPHIC LANGUAGE USED IN THE REVIEW BELOW**

If you are not familiar with the genre of graphic novels, this is probably not the place for you to start. This is not a comic book. This is a dark, dirty, depressing, distressing, gruesome, gritty, gory story that can actually make you laugh and maybe even feel a little good. Really.

Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, and I’m starting to sound like the type of person I used to complain about, but really…do we really need a constant barrage of “fuck” in our literature … even our graphic novels? This one crossed the line and over-did it. I was beginning to think that David Mamet might be embarrassed by the number of fuck-bombs here.

I mean…we get it. Right? These are low-life scum and this is how low-life scum talk. I know it’s true. I hear it too often on the streets and in the stores. I know it’s how people talk. But if it were used once or twice, i think we’d still get the picture and it wouldn’t take away from the story.

So…back to the review… I was ready to give up and not read any further because I don’t care to associate with the low-life scum who talk like this and I don’t really enjoy reading about low-life scum who talk with such cursing …  when there suddenly appeared a cartoon blue pony/unicorn.

Yeah, for real.

And suddenly I get it. When you want to contrast sappy cartoon happiness with scum, you want extremes, and Grant Morrison gives it to us in puking, blood-bath bucket-fulls.

Only our sleazy anti-hero can see the My Little Pony Wannabee, and our happiness-embodied cartoon (named “Happy”) saves our anti-hero’s life and tries to get him, in turn, to help save a little girl’s life. It’s kind of a brilliant story, and it’s the kind of story that can only be told as a graphic novel (with thanks, in large part, to artist Darick Robertson). Even another visual medium (film or television) would likely ruin either the uber-dark reality world of Nick Sax, or the cutesy cute world of Happy the Fucking Hors-icorn.

The were a couple of twists in the story, one which I should have seen coming, but didn’t.

If you like the genre, or know Grant Morrison’s work, then you’re sure to enjoy this. If you aren’t familiar with graphic novels, go read a few before you come to this one…but do come to this one when you’re ready.