Customer Reviews

In My Darkest Hour

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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.

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.