Perfect Example

John Porcellino

I'm going to open this with a comment that's going to strike a lot of people as odd: I'm getting kind of sick of the graphic-novel-as-memoir thing.

I don't expect people will find it odd that I am (I rather suspect a lot of people are), but that I use it to open this particular review, as Porcellino's book predates just about every graphic-novel-as-memoir I've reviewed in the past two years. I only stumbled across it in 2005 because (a) a much larger distro company picked it up, and (b) Porcellino has been getting a lot of press for his second book, Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man. When I saw the title on this one, I asked myself if it could possibly be related to the Husker Du song of the same name, and immediately placed it on hold. When I get it, I open it up, and there's a Bob Mould lyric staring me in the face. I was as close to genetically predisposed to liking this book as I could possibly be; Porcellino is roughly the same age as I am (a few months younger, if memory serves), and we grew up listening to the same music, suffering the same growing pains at the same time, all that sort of thing. I mean, in the world of memoirs, this is something I should really have identified with. And I rush to add that I don't blame John Porcellino for my not really connecting with it (nor my own upbringing).

Drawn and Quarterly picked this up and reprinted it in October of 2005-- well after many of the big names in graphic-novel-memoir had published (Satrapi, David B., Clowes, Pekar, Thompson, etc. were all quite well established) and right on the heels of the best of the bunch to be published to date (Charles Burns' superlative Black Hole). Instead of being in the vanguard of the movement, it feels as if Porcellino is a very small fish in a very big pond. It's not his fault. His drawings are almost shocking at first, given their (for lack of a better term) naivete, but once you get used to it, his characters (who often echo Charles Schulz, and if you're going to copy a master, you might as well copy the master) come off the page quite nicely; in fact, they have as much of an emotional resonance, at times, as those in any of the other, bigger-name memoirs. Where Porcellino stumbles is that he fails to sustain the emotional pitch; the showing is too often broken up by stretches of telling.

It's a good book, just not a great one. I'm still looking forward to Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man.