My War With Brian (Paperback)

by Ted Rall (Author) "LOTS OF PEOPLE GOT INTO FIGHTS AS A KID..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This morbidly fascinating memoir-in-comics is one of the more frightening recollections of childhood bullying you're likely ever ever read. Rall grew up in the 1970s in Kettering, Ohio ("suburb of the damned"), a town of stunning homogeneity that concealed an undercurrent of absurd intolerance. An intelligent, "brown-haired, brown-eyed freak" with divorced parents and a French mother, Rall was routinely vilified by his unambitious, intellectual-hating classmates and relentlessly beaten and harassed by Brian, a strange and brutal kid he first encountered in junior high. Brian made Rall's life miserable for no discernible reason other than Rall's superficial social difference. Smaller than Brian and fearful of him, Rall was nevertheless equally cruel, devising indirect but gruesomely violent counterattacks. Rall's mother was powerless to stop these daily clashes, school officials were weirdly indifferent and the strange, primal conflict continued into high school. Puberty miraculously added eight inches and 12 pounds to Rall's frame, and he finally beat Brian into a bloody, senseless heap in the school hallway. Presented in Rall's angularly comic b&w drawings, the story alternates between a quirky poignancy and a thoughtful but bleak humor. With irony and introspection, Rall examines the effects of this bizarre experience on his development. He still often dreams of killing Brian but admits that "Brian made me stronger, but he also made me meaner, less trusting, hateful of hypermasculine men.... without him I might never have drawn cartoons, escaped Ohio or gotten laid."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA-Political and social-commentary cartoonist Rall offers a fictionalized slice of his junior and senior high school experiences with the class bully. Because his story is told entirely from the perspective and with all the insight of the teenaged male protagonist, not only is the profanity profuse but other possibly offensive, yet realistically on-target, vocabulary abounds. Brian Koff may have been a bully but clearly young Rall offered him opportunity and excuse: the narrator shows himself to be somewhat conceited, defiantly classist, and ready to lash out with assorted weaponry. He hospitalizes Brian, plans his murder, and continues to demonstrate his own abilities to draw enemy blood all the way through high school. This is testosterone-driven fantasy in part, perhaps, but as anyone who remembers the cruel underbelly of adolescence can attest, events like the ones recorded here can be as much a part of the local school hallway culture as pinup pictures of movie stars. Rall's introduction memorializes a high school friend who chose suicide over responding with violence against his tormentors. Is there another way? Of course, but in real life, sometimes it is just plain impossible for kids to see that adolescence with all its evils isn't a permanent condition. Will this book speak to high school readers? Absolutely! But adults who have forgotten how gruesome those years can be also need to read it.
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 60 pages
• Publisher: Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing (August 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1561632155
• ISBN-13: 978-1561632152
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,235,954 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 1979 in "the village of the damned", August 22, 2006

By	Michael J. Mcgrath (Madison, WI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A short graphic novel about parents and school personnel too lazy enforce, let alone teach, basic standards of civilization. Somewhat based on real life, Rall casts himself as an outsider in a bland late 1970s Midwestern suburb. A small kid, "too smart" and ethnically different, he was not considered important by either the adults or kids, and soon becomes the constant target of one angry and very violent kid.

That there are bullies and nasty people is never unusual, but this book is unusually telling in that it exposes succinctly the blasé nihilism of late-`70s middle America. Early on, Rall responds to another bully in a history class by sneaking up on the cretin and cracking him over the head with a desk. "Mr Bradford took the roll call, marking the unconscious student absent." (p.9) Rall shows how the unmotivated, middleclass school teachers cared not about violence, learning, nothing...just getting by. The administration, the community just saw extreme violence and intimidation as "what boys do". Rall aptly calls this "a Darwinian nightmare of benign neglect."

I can testify that Rall's vision of that time and place is the correct one, and further that Rall's illustration of the consequences of adult nihilism is spot on. For 40 or so pages Rall shows how violence, vandalism, and youthful fighting are the ultimate effect of adults brushing their charges off with a stupid "you just have to learn to handle yourself". Like any war or feud, the battles escalate into something with little relation to the initial "cause", all because no one wanted to be responsible or be blessed as a peacemaker.

Like many a Rall cartoon, the "background" comments are brilliant. In BRIAN the kids who witness the violents offer only a mind-numbed "oh, cool"; the attempt by kids to be in control is contrasted nicely to the stone indifference of adults.

In the end of the tale, Rall allows people to escape death so he can show how the kids grow up to carry resentments and hate all their lives. (Rall says the kid who inspired the book actually killed himself.)

This book is yet another part of Rall's general theme found in all his work: the indictment of today's institutions as cover for the most short-sighted and stupid bureaucratic mindset possible. It therefore fits Rall's jarring cartooning.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shocking and savage yet rings with truth, November 3, 2004

By	deaner73 (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Just when you think Ted Rall's, "My War with Brian," is going to be another run-of-the-mill victim story about bullying, this autobiographic tale takes a surprising shift when the misfit geek decides to fight back in shockingly savage fashion. And thus begins a full fledged war spanning the eternal length of time during Junior High and High School where Ted Rall learns to be a man, standing up for himself and exacting due punishment to those who strike at him, consequences be damned. At times, laugh out loud funny, this book will also shock in reminding you how brutal kids/teens can be to one another - the physical cruelty that Ted and Brian exact on one another is frightening in its murderous intent but just past that initial layer of shock comes a somewhat disturbing reminder of the cruelties adolescents face as they transition to adulthood.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and true, February 16, 1999

By A Customer

I moved to the States from Alaska at about the same time as Ted Rall was in HS, to finish high school. This comic is the only thing I can think of that ever captured that era - [impolite word] "Dazed and Confused" for example.

I should add that the high school I went to (in Wisconsin) was a (Lutheran) theocracy to rival anything in Iran. While I was constantly getting beat on by a gang of openly white supremacist kids at the school, which was quite backward by Alaskan standards, I usually got the flack from school officials who were chummy with them. Other than the extremes of the ultraviolence, I think people should think twice before thinking this is some kind of exaggeration for effect by Rall. Ted Rall's visual style is great, too, and I was happy to see that people who bought My War with Brian also read Ruben Bollings, another superb comic genius. I think Rall is a good representative of us 30-somethings born in the 60s, too - a more or less Lost Generation between the baby-boomers and their echo generation, but which includes the whole Brat Pack and cartoonists like Tom Tomorrow, Rall, and, I believe, Bollings.