Author: Bob Fingerman
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
This is a black & white line-drawing graphic novel about Luther Joyce, a middle-aged black guy who happens to be working as a janitor at a nuclear power plant when there's an incident, and he's exposed to radiation. The clean-up crew erases all his employment records from the computer, and essentially flushes him down the toilet, but Luther doesn’t die. Now having no employment history, and looking like The Thing (with a curiously Dr Manhattan-style symbol on his forehead), he resorts to begging on the streets, but he has little success.
Due to a really fortunate series of events (for him) Luther finds himself with the opportunity to have his brain transplanted into the teenage white-girl's body, that of Louella Schwartz. After he's recovered (which takes a remarkably short time) he heads "home" to Lou's place with her ID in his purse - and has to deal with her parents, and her lesbian best friend.
This novel is warped, but it was warped in a way which really appealed to me. It was out there enough that despite the rather lackluster artwork, I got into this right away and read it right through, in one sitting. There's some so-called 'bonus' material at the end, evidently covering a different aspect of this same story, but I didn’t bother reading that, so I won't comment on it.
I liked this story and the characters. It was engrossing and had some interesting things to say. The artwork, as I mentioned before, was really curious to me. All of the females (I say 'all', but there were really only three, not counting Lou's mom) looked preferentially masculine, and I'm still wondering why that was. This is the only Fingerman I've read, so I can't tell if he just routinely draws women that way, or if he had some purpose in depicting them in this manner on this occasion. It was also interesting that he showed the main female character completely nude or semi nude on several occasions, but never her best friend - she always had something restricting the view of her more personal parts, rather like those wispy gauze pieces in renaissance paintings! Neither were any guys depicted in the same way Lou was. I have no idea why this was.
There's no reason at all why all women (or any one of them) needs to look outstandingly feminine, by any means. Real live women (as opposed to fictionalized women!), look all kinds of different ways, and there's nothing remarkable about that, so maybe this was a reflection of real life (as opposed to a comic book version of real life). Perhaps it was in protest against comics which 'feminize' women to extremes - as superhero comics typically do. Maybe it was some sort of "butch lesbian" representation or commentary, or maybe it just means that this writer/artist simply can’t draw (or hates to draw) female characters. I don’t know. I couldn’t get a good impression of why this was the way it was, so I guess I'll just have to wonder about it - and maybe that's what the author wanted!
But overall, I have to report that I really enjoyed this comic and found it intriguing and entertaining, so I recommend it.
