12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very good, but . . ., April 4, 2006
This review is from: Tricked (Hardcover)
Okay, I liked this book a lot, but the other reviews here are like the kind of rabid fan reviews you get on Fruits Basket and Salior Moon manga.
A review on the back of the book says it is like an Altman movie. A review on this site says that the book is full of wonderful three dimensional characters. I disagree on both counts.
The plot comes to too much of an overbaked climax. It is still good and entertaining, but Altman has stood for less easy, less obviously indebted to the medium of film resolutions. Say Robinson's film touchstone here is Curtis Hanson or Guy Ritchie -- effective and complex, but too prone to letting the pulp of their plots overwhelm the character arcs.
The characters are mostly, if not flat like the sports card shop guy or Phoebe's Dad, at least they change in yawn-inducingly familiar ways on the whole. Our nutty fan, Beam himself and Beam's new personal assistant . . . I've seen them before. Maybe I haven't seen them as nuanced as I have here in a long time, but there are too many places where there is nothing new and I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Not coincidentally, the places where the characters fall flat are exactly those places where the overly contrived Beam "trick" lies.
The places where this work is genius are in those places that surround the beautifully realized character of plus-sized waitress Caprice. The way Robinson works on issues of romance, hurt, body image, friendship and the way we become the things we hate and that hated us, at least for a while, are sublime. As a character, she makes Phoebe and our sports card forger come alive and come out of the stereotypes they revert to in other potions of the book.
In terms of the art and layout this book is also great, but with moments that prevent it from reaching the fifth star. As a small example, there is a tremendous splash page of Ray Beam's face vivisected into panels. Only in one small panel his sunglasses are missing and we see a small portion of his eye, his humanity. Excellent! Then, toward the end of the book, we get a splash of Steve, our nutcase, splintered into panel shards of insanity. Okay. Nice, but just like the bit where he yanks out his tooth with pliers, I've already had that idea digested for me multiple times in American pop culture.
Robinson wants the end of the book, with its "exciting" ending and its tripped out but mostly indulgent art flourishes, to have great impact. Maybe. He's obviously working really hard here. But maybe that's the problem. Too much work. It feels a bit like he's gripping real hard.
To sum up, the book is tremendously entertaining, it's just that some of the entertainments are better than others. Unlike the reviewer here who argued that this is the type of graphic novel work that is allowing comics to hit a stride, I'd disagree. There are depressing indications that the field of "indie" comics is stuck somewhere between the ambition, scope and character of Los Bros Hernandez, the slice of life verisimilitude of Abel, Pekar and Satrapi, and the PoMo irony of Clowes, Ware and Moore. And like the late 90s "indie" film scene, this book is yet more evidence that maybe we're not really sure how to effectively and artistically navigate through those waters.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Indie Film as Graphic Novel, March 10, 2007
This review is from: Tricked (Hardcover)
I'd never checked out anything by Robinson before, but the opening pages intrigued me enough to take it home for the weekend. And at the end, the overall effect was kind of like reading the graphic novel equivalent of a reasonably decent indie film. The obvious comparison is to ones like Short Cuts or Amores Perros, since the book alternates between the stories of six unrelated characters whose lives intersect over the course of the book until they come together at the climax. The six characters are: Ray Beam (a reclusive rock star mired in several years of writer's block), Steve (an obsessive and possibly schizophrenic fan of Ray's), Lily (a young Latina woman who becomes Ray's assistant), Nick (a struggling father and husband who forges sports star autographs for a living), Phoebe (a small-town teenager coming to the big city to find the father she never met), and Caprice (a waitress at a kitschy diner run by a gay couple).
The book is divided into fifty sections, each of which focuses on one of the six protagonists. This gives us plenty of time to get to know them, which is both a good and a bad thing. Ray is basically a total cliche of an ex-rock star: fancy home, lots of drugs, elaborate sex with hookers, total self-centeredness and inability to relate to the outside world. His writer's block isn't particularly interesting, and his portrayal is so over the top and implausible that it's hard take his focal position seriously. Similarly, Lily's role as the naive young woman who drifts into his life and falls in love with him is a thankless one, as she's basically reduced to playing a supporting love interest role. Ray's obsessed fan is marginally more interesting, but more for his venom and bile than as a nuanced characters. He's an IT support guy with some kind of mental illness (schizophrenia maybe?), and has stopped taking his meds. This makes him increasingly rude, erratic, and ultimately dangerous, which, again, is familiar turf. (There is a nice bit though where he goes to see his grandmother and you get a glimpse of his humanity trying to break through.)
The forger is a rather more interesting cat -- a husband and father who lies to his family about his job, and gets more and more involved in his crooked Russian boss's schemes. The teenager comes from New Mexico to find her father and eventually winds up at the diner where the waitress works. She's kind of a nonentity in the story, and her arc isn't particularly interesting. Finally, waitress Caprice is the most compelling character and clearly the heart and soul of the book. Her name is perhaps a little too coy, but otherwise, her parts are the most engaging and real. It's a bit disappointing then, that her self-sabotaging nature is exaggerated to the point that she shuts out on the guy she's in love with to hang out with the increasingly aggressive and annoying Nick.
In any event, the various storylines all dovetail in a violent climax at the diner that is reasonably predictable and reasonably satisfying. Again, like many decent indie films, it's enjoyable and maintains one's interest, with some typical characers and a few nice moments, but doesn't leave much of an impact or lasting impression.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely wonderful!, January 9, 2009
This review is from: Tricked (Hardcover)
Alex Robinson at his very best....
Amazing storyline, witty dialogues and complex beautiful characters who cannot let you put this one down...
I was sad when it was over!
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