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In My Darkest Hour
 
 
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In My Darkest Hour [Paperback]

Wilfred Santiago (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

Price: $14.95 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
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Book Description

December 20, 2004
First book by a powerful new voice in graphic lit. The Age of Anxiety has never been better depicted in comics form than in In My Darkest Hour, a modernist, mainstream graphic novel that explores the inner life of its protagonist, Omar Guerrero, a 28 year-old Latin American transient, who confronts his pervasive feelings of inadequacy, anger, guilt, and escalating alienation.

Guerrero's tumultuous sexual liaisons with younger women, an attempt to deny his fading youth, force him to question his own nature and values as he struggles between expurgating his neuroses and the evasive understanding of his existence. His peculiar relationship with Lucinda, a secluded student, gives him a vague sense of hope, a vision of a life of inner stability, and perhaps love. But old demons die hard, and the futility of his fight has him wondering how long before he finally either overcomes his pathos or succumbs to his weaknesses.

Memories and nightmares fuel Omar's fear that he might not only be losing his mind, but that perhaps, he already has. In My Darkest Hour is a harrowing meditation on human angst, painful subjectivity, and the quintessential quest of self in a seemingly bleak, uncertain and mutable world.


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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This brilliantly drawn and unrelentingly grim graphic novel follows the saga of Omar, a youngish man trapped in a dead-end job and an unfulfilling relationship, living in an unfeeling world. Omar's bipolar disorder makes him see life as a cruel slog, with nothing but death to look forward to. He's depressed, he's grumpy and he drinks too much. He's growing increasingly distant from his girlfriend, Lucinda; he chases other women and flirts shamelessly with co-workers. And all the while, at work at the card store and at home with his alcohol, he wonders what he's going to do with his life. Santiago's vision of humanity is brutal; his characters have great difficulty seeing beyond their immediate circumstances and relate to each other in only the most superficial ways. Society is against Omar: the owner of the card store is that reliable stereotype—the Jewish man who's blatantly prejudiced against people of color—and when Lucinda finally decides to dump the albatross that is Omar, readers will wonder what took her so long. Santiago paints Omar's world in a radiant pastiche of drawing, collage and all manner of PhotoShop effects; he abandons comic conventions—characters in neat frames with word balloons—for handwritten essays and disjointed musings. Despite the dazzling technique, readers may be left thinking Omar's story is as pointless as he thinks it is.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Santiago skills reminiscent of Dave McKean, expert collage of photos will break your heart as much as his characters do. -- Austin Chronicle, December 10, 2004

Wilfred Santiago has a great ear for dialogue and artistic versatility-- On a technical level, this book is fantastic. -- www.comicbookresources.com, December 22, 2004

you can’t tear your eyes away from the page. And what pages they are! Grade: B+ -- moviepoopshoot.com, February 1, 2005

Product Details

  • Paperback: 128 pages
  • Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (December 20, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1560975911
  • ISBN-13: 978-1560975915
  • Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.1 x 0.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #206,000 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

 

Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Dark and Genuine, January 14, 2005
By 
Wileenie (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews
This review is from: In My Darkest Hour (Paperback)
This graphic novel is a good, albeit dark, read. The main character, Omar, goes through a lot of difficulties--and is completely human through all of them. He is not a strong person; he is definitely human and weak, and he struggles with the "right" thing to do and what he wants to do.

The book varies between traditional dialogue bubbles and letters and journals, and these differences make this an interesting book to read.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Story outshone by art, May 17, 2007
This review is from: In My Darkest Hour (Paperback)
If you're reading In My Darkest Hour for the plot, you're going to be disappointed. It's a pretty typical slacker story of Omar -- a fat twenty-something who tries to hold on to his youth by chasing PYTs. He boozes too much, abuses his anti-depressants, and works a dead end job where there's a Jew who hates people of color - hence Omar as well. The world is stacked against our anti-hero, but he is consistently able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

What shines though the pedestrian story is the art. Santiago creates a flat grey style to reflect Omar's outlook on his life. The only other color used is a festering looking pus-yellow. Additionally, Santiago ignores comic conventions like word balloons and instead drops in Photoshopped images that, instead of making the art look hyper real, actually reinforces the strange dead flatness of Omar's work. There are handwritten essays dropped into the story, and beautiful splash pages filled with textually experiments and graphic art that would look incredible sold as prints.

To understand In My Darkest Hour, one needs to understand what has come before it - it difficult to understand Santiago's work as a reaction to the conventions of Graphic Novels without having read a lot of the genre. For a shortcut, take a look at Scott McCloud's Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels and then understand how Santiago attempts, successfully, to undermine what we want comics to look like. That psychic opening that Santiago tears though his style then allows him to force us to look at his story in a new way - I just wish it was a more interesting tale.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
-THE SIXTY-FOUR YEAR OLD WOMAN WAS FOUND DEAD AFTER NEIGHBORS' COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE SMELL COMIN' FROM HER APARTMENT-LIKE I SAID-WE'RE NOT MAKING THIS UP-HER STARVING CATS ACTUALLY HAVE BEEN FEEDING OFF HER DEAD BODY THE WHOLE TIME. Read the first page
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