Rating: WARTY!
Sugar Skull (not to be confused, believe it or not, with a score of other novels of the same name) is the last of a trilogy of graphic novels, which I unfortunately read first, not realizing this was part of a series (X'ed Out, The Hive, and this volume)). It made no sense to me and the ending was a complete bust, essentially telling the reader they had wasted their time because this trilogy went literally nowhere. The library didn't have the middle volume, and when I picked up volumes one and three, I thought they were separate stories in the same world! Graphic novel creators, I've noticed, are extraordinarily bad about indicating that a novel is part of a series and they're even worse at indicating which step in the series the one you're holding in your hand actually is. Even having read the first in the series, however, it still didn't make this one any more sensible or became any more accessible.
The initial problem with this for me was, not having read the previous two volumes, that I had no idea that the main character had a cartoon fantasy running in his head. Even knowing that retrospectively and reconsidering this novel, it still made no sense, but at least that knowledge explained some of the weird switching between ostensibly unconnected (and ultimately nonsensical) story lines.
The basic story is of a man, Doug, who's really a kid who won't grow up, pursuing adolescent fantasies of being a rock-star or an artist, instead of getting his act together. Maybe he could actually have been a rock-star or an artist, but he simply doesn't have the wherewithal to pursue any career, so he wastes time in his fantasy world, lolling around, doing no work, unable to make any effort, and going nowhere. To his credit, he got off the booze, but he's really not good at staying off it, and he appears to have no idea what's wrong with his life.
He's a father who fled when he learned his girlfriend, Sarah, was pregnant. Despite her extensive and repeated efforts to contact him, he meanly stonewalled her consistently. She's done fine without him, as he learns later, and she has no desire whatsoever to have him back in her, and especially not her kid's, life.
Doug himself has been married, but is a serial cheater, so no sign of maturity there either. In a further insult, the band he was with actually took off after he left (no word on whether there was a connection between these two events!), and while one of the guys in the band still has affection for Doug, the girl outright and uncompromisingly rejects him as bad news. She evidently knows something we're just learning!
In his fantasy life, Doug goes by the name of Tintin backwards, and looks like the veteran cartoon star. The fantasies are unremarkable though weird, and they convey little, and they really achieve nothing for the reader or for Doug himself, but he cannot let go of them or grow out of them. He gets beaten up at one point by Sarah's psychotic ex-boyfriend, and even this doesn't make an ounce of difference to his life. In short, why would anyone care about this guy or what happens to him? I didn't, and I cannot recommend this.
