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Tricked, Alex Robinson

My graphic novel experiments continue!  I checked this out because I opened it up and I liked some of the things the artist did with panels.  I still do actually – there’s a page I remember, where the whole page is the character’s face, and it’s broken up into panels with dialogue across it.  It’s a good effect, how the dialogue washes across the character as he’s deep in thought.  Maybe it’s because I read Scott McCloud’s books, or maybe it’s because there were some rather flashy art choices (not flashy in a bad way!), but I noticed panel divisions and art tricks a lot more, reading Tricks, than I have in past graphic novel readings.

Tricked is about a number of people – a musician, Ray Beam, who hasn’t recorded an album in years; a pretty girl called Lily who becomes his personal assistant (with or without quotation marks); a waitress called Caprice who’s looking for luuuuv; a girl who comes to find her long-lost father; a fantastically boring forger in a pawn shop; and a schizophrenic IT guy called Steve who has gone off his meds.

I don’t know.  I enjoyed reading this, I guess,  but I didn’t really care what happened to any of the characters.  They were cardboard cutouts of Types, I thought, and not much happened to make them more interesting.  A lot of the situations seemed far-fetched, and just became more so as the story went on.  Even when the characters themselves acknowledged the craziness of their lives, it didn’t make their lives any less implausibly crazy.  When I finished the book, I felt like I had been waiting for better things.

The art was excellent though.  Really.  I think the reason I finished the book at all was that the art was very cool.  Lots of good tricks (tricks, Tricked, ya see what I did there?) with the panels, and with making the pictures and dialogue work together.  I love that stuff.

If you reviewed this let me know and I will link to yours!