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crookedtreehouse's review
4.0
A customer at the store I work at has been looking for someone to talk to about Crickets.
I read a fair amount of non-mainstream comics, so, even though I've found myself being less and less enchanted with the books Fantagraphics has been putting out, I agreed to check out Sammy Harkham's series.
I quite like it. Often the "slice of life" comics about artists or writers feature the artist as either a raunchy rebel who tells it like it is because the world doesn't understand him (and, yes, in my experience it's always been a him and not a her having their rebel comics published), or else they're victims of a society that doesn't understand them. Or they're boring. Sometimes they're just boring.
Crickets features a few stories, though the main character is similar in tone in each of the stories, being a beleaguered creator of art having difficulty with their career, and also with their relationships.
All of them feel really honest. I don't mean true. Honest. Each of the characters struggles with the way they see the people around them, but you get the feeling that were you to ask these characters who was victimizing them, they would reply "life" as opposed to one of the other characters in the book.
It's also nicely refreshing that this book features men having troubled relationships with women, and the female characters are never seen as the cause of the relationship problems. Each of the people in the relationship is suffering the other.
That seems like a small thing, but if you look at most of the independent and underground comic artists of the late 20th/early 21st centuries you realize that, had they been born twenty-five years later they wouldn't have been comic book artists, they would have been Men's Rights Activists trolling and doxxing women they thought had "done them wrong".
Harkham doesn't do that. Thankfully.
I would recommend this comic (there's no graphic novel version of this series yet) to people who think underground comics are pretentious but wish they weren't, struggling artists desperate for a writer to "get them" without making them out to be sociopaths, and anyone looking for something completely unlike anything you're going to read from DC/Marvel/Image/Dark Horse/IDW/Boom/Dynamite/etc.
I read a fair amount of non-mainstream comics, so, even though I've found myself being less and less enchanted with the books Fantagraphics has been putting out, I agreed to check out Sammy Harkham's series.
I quite like it. Often the "slice of life" comics about artists or writers feature the artist as either a raunchy rebel who tells it like it is because the world doesn't understand him (and, yes, in my experience it's always been a him and not a her having their rebel comics published), or else they're victims of a society that doesn't understand them. Or they're boring. Sometimes they're just boring.
Crickets features a few stories, though the main character is similar in tone in each of the stories, being a beleaguered creator of art having difficulty with their career, and also with their relationships.
All of them feel really honest. I don't mean true. Honest. Each of the characters struggles with the way they see the people around them, but you get the feeling that were you to ask these characters who was victimizing them, they would reply "life" as opposed to one of the other characters in the book.
It's also nicely refreshing that this book features men having troubled relationships with women, and the female characters are never seen as the cause of the relationship problems. Each of the people in the relationship is suffering the other.
That seems like a small thing, but if you look at most of the independent and underground comic artists of the late 20th/early 21st centuries you realize that, had they been born twenty-five years later they wouldn't have been comic book artists, they would have been Men's Rights Activists trolling and doxxing women they thought had "done them wrong".
Harkham doesn't do that. Thankfully.
I would recommend this comic (there's no graphic novel version of this series yet) to people who think underground comics are pretentious but wish they weren't, struggling artists desperate for a writer to "get them" without making them out to be sociopaths, and anyone looking for something completely unlike anything you're going to read from DC/Marvel/Image/Dark Horse/IDW/Boom/Dynamite/etc.
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