Customer Reviews

110 Per¢ (110 Percent)

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110 Per Cent (I Don't think I have a cent sign character) by Top Shelf is a wonderfully sarcastic skewering of both boy bands, and their fanatical followers, hilariously, and somewhat tragically presented by Tony Consiglio.

Cathy, Gerty, and Sasha are three middle-aged women obsessed with the boy ban "110 percent). They belong to a club named MOFO (Mature Older Fans Of...110 per cent) who meet monthly to discuss the bands tours, rumors, upcoming CD,s and the band's discarded food that they intend to sell on eBay.

Cathy is a sheepish office worker, harassed by fellow employees. Sasha is a rather brow-beaten housewife whose husband simply cannot understand his wife's devotion to the band. Worst of the lot is Gerty, a mother who puts her affection for the band ahead of even the needs of her husband and family.

When the bad is coming to town, Gerty manages to only get two tickets and her and Cathy conspire to go to the show without Sasha finding out. Yet Sasha's husband, gruff though he may be, surprises her with a pair of her own tickets. Cathy now must find a reason to NOT go with Sasha so she can go with Gerty, a plot which makes her feel quite guilty.

Consiglio manages to make the women even more pathetic than the bands themselves. You can't help but pity the trio for not realizing just how sad their lives are. It's at once very humorous as well as quite sad.

Top Shelf continues to deliver comics their own way. They don't stick to conventions and are only all to willing to tell these slice-of-life type stories. 110 Per Cent is another gem!

Reviewed by Tim Janson

I enjoyed 110 Percent. I have to say that for me the characters were not cliched. However, the book does aim at easy targets.

The band isn't explored at all: they're just pretty faces, and the reader learns almost nothing about its members or its history, or what draws the adult fans to their music. It's obvious from the start that the mature fans are sad because they follow a boy band which is loved by tweenies. They have sad lives and the band gives them glamour and excitement. Sasha has a distant verbally abusive husband who looks like every slob husband from newspaper comic strips. Cathy is single, overweight, lonely, and picked on by her colleagues at work. Gerty is so obsessed with the band she neglects her husband and children. Their actions are sad too: they take half eaten junk food from the trash which the band has thrown out and sell the sandwiches on Ebay. The women in the fan club fight and sling insults at each other (the minutes for each meeting end with heated exchanges). The men in their lives are jerks. One man attends the group in order to have sex: "It's like shooting a barrel of fish. I look deep into their eyes and say, "Yeah Baby, 110 percent is so great". And that's it, they're mine." Cathy's realisation that the long awaited new album stinks comes quickly, as does her insight that she's wasting her life chasing a lousy boy band.

And yet Consiglio achieves real pathos by the end of the women's stories. Sasha's husband, for all his gruffness, tries to please his wife by buying her tickets to the band's concert. Gerty's husband gets fed up and leaves. Despite all the fighting and competitiveness , the fan club does promote real friendship. After renouncing the band, Cathy apologizes to Sasha and they stay close. Gerty on the other hand ends up seeing the club Romeo in order to watch his band imports.

"110 percent" effectively portrays how celebrity culture can be a draining influence on many people's lives. The story is imaginatively developed and the artwork is quirky and masterful. I wish the story could have also shown positive aspects fandom can bring to people. Did Cathy and Sasha have to reject the band before they could become true friends and form fulfilling relationships with others?

I hate to give a bad review to any Top Shelf comic - I really like almost everything they put out - but I absolutely loathed 110 Per¢. Well, let me rephrase: The art was good. I enjoyed that part of it. Overall, I like his style and the panel layout was lovely. But the actual story... well, it had major issues. I would not recommend this book to anybody. Man, I rarely come across a book that gets me ticked off enough to write a big long negative review! But this one did it.

The first problem was that, while it seemed like Consiglio was trying to make the main characters three-dimensional (they're middle-aged fans of a boy band! But they all have other lives!) he only succeeded in resorting to the most tired stereotypes about fans. One of them is neglected and possibly verbally abused by her husband; another is fat and insecure and can't find a man; the third is a feminist who neglects her family in favor of her fandom. (The secondary characters aren't any better; they're flat as boards, only significant in how they interact with the main three, and seeming to have no other characteristics.)

Honestly, I could have gotten past these broad-painted characters, if the book seemed to be written at all sympathetically. That is, the main thrust of the book is - you guessed it! - showing how miserable and empty these characters' lives are, and how fandom is a symptom of that misery. To me, that doesn't sound like a "humorous and scathing commentary on the American obsession with celebrity culture," or at least not one that we haven't heard a zillion times before. In fact, we never meet the band members of 110 Per¢, nor do we ever learn anything about the other side of this dichotomy (which could have been potentially interesting). They're a cipher, a cruddy band that teenage girls love but which is not at all implicated in these pathetic fans' obsession. The book's message is more or less "if you're dumb enough to use fandom as an escape from your cruddy life, we feel sorry for you."

Again, though, that's a valid position and - while I disagree with it - I don't have any problem with someone really believing it or even writing a comic about it. What I do have a problem with, a major problem, is the incredibly sexist way 110 Per¢ makes that argument. The book started off seeming to give me hope: in one of the first scenes, the insecure character is being sexually harassed in her office; the feminist character walks in on it and puts an end to it, basically saying "You shouldn't have to put up with this." At this point, I was thinking "all right; he's starting with these stock characters, but they've got a real friendship, and there's going to be some amount of making fun of fans, but there'll be a reaffirmation that the really important thing is their relationships with each other..."

As if.

Over the course of the book, we see that the feminist character sows discord everywhere she goes. The three main characters, supposedly "friends," actually just spend the entire book having drama with each other. In the end, the insecure character has the grand revelation is that 110 Per¢ is a bad band! And she shouldn't be wasting her time on it! So she ends up... stopping being a fan and going out with her boss, who looked the other way when she was sexually harassed! Meanwhile, the neglected wife realizes that actually, she ought to make up with her husband. So she goes off, presumably to keep being verbally abused. The feminist's husband leaves her and takes the kids (because she forgot that he doesn't like mustard on his bologna sandwich, I am not kidding) and she ends up with a guy who comes to 110 Per¢ fan club meetings just to pick up chicks. Everybody gets what they deserve! It turns out that women who are fans can be cured by the magical power of sex with dudes. Thanks for the clarification, Tony Consiglio! I never thought of that!

Sigh.

Consiglio usually does the funny stuff well, this book we see his humor, and also his storytelling prowress. These women are sad, disgusting and hilarious all rolled up into one...a must read.