or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
Express Checkout with PayPhrase
What's this? | Create PayPhrase
Sorry!
X
More Buying Choices
47 used & new from $1.99
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Tricked
 
See larger image 
Share your own customer images
Publisher: learn how customers can search inside this book.
Tell the Publisher!
I’d like to read this book on Kindle

Don’t have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.
 
  

Tricked (Paperback)

~ (Author, Artist)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
List Price: $19.95
Price: $10.98 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $8.97 (45%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Usually ships within 1 to 2 weeks.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

23 new from $3.99 24 used from $1.99

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
  Paperback $10.98 $3.99 $1.99

Frequently Bought Together

Tricked + Box Office Poison + Too Cool To Be Forgotten
Price For All Three: $41.96

Some of these items ship sooner than the others. Show details

  • This item: Tricked by Alex Robinson

    Usually ships within 1 to 2 weeks.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • Too Cool To Be Forgotten by Alex Robinson

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

BOP! More Box Office Poison

BOP! More Box Office Poison

by Alex Robinson
5.0 out of 5 stars (1)  $9.95
Too Cool To Be Forgotten

Too Cool To Be Forgotten

by Alex Robinson
4.5 out of 5 stars (12)  $11.21
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

by Chris Ware
4.3 out of 5 stars (125)  $13.57
Blankets

Blankets

by Craig Thompson
4.7 out of 5 stars (135)  $19.77
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

by Alison Bechdel
4.7 out of 5 stars (108)  $10.04
› Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. It's been four years since Robinson's Box Office Poison won an Eisner Award, as well as the prize for best debut graphic novel at the international festival in Angoulême. It's been a long wait, but Tricked is well worth it. This dense graphic novel follows the paths of six characters who weave around one another, all finally meeting in the story's violent climax. The six are Ray Beam, a blocked and exhausted rock star; Nick, a small-time grifter; Phoebe, a daughter in search of her father; Steve, the very worst kind of music fan; Lily, a young girl drawn into Ray's artistic drama; and Caprice, a self-defeating waitress. Before the final meeting, each leads a fully realized life, whose detailed individuality and complex relationships mark Robinson as a truly gifted writer. His art is no less impressive, with clear line drawings that hone in on the subtleties of his characters' emotional lives. A master of the slice-of-life indie comic genre, Robinson brings a strong dramatic force to his work as well. Robinson's talent allows his characters to be comprehensible even when they act like spoiled jerks or sabotage their own chances for happiness—but his authorial generosity returns them all to their own best selves by the end. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist

A creatively blocked rock star, a signature--forging memorabilia-shop clerk, a teenager seeking the father she has never known, a functional schizophrenic not taking his meds, a waitress suffering from her latest breakup, and a pretty Latina doing temp work eventually converge for a violent climax. Before then, some cross paths and more as Robinson again displays the character- and relationship-development skills that, along with his assured, lightly caricatural draftsmanship, made Box Office Poison (2001) and BOP! (2003) so absorbing and satisfying. The Latina meets the rock star and unblocks him. The teenager finds Dad and is befriended by the waitress, who, though now with the best man ever, starts seeing the forger on the side. Meanwhile, the schizophrenic gets weirder. Inspired plotwise, it seems, by The Bridge of San Luis Rey and the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Lennon's murder, Robinson excels at less-than-transparent personae whose adventures he skips among in chapters presented in a countdown, 49 to 1, that bolsters the story's inherent suspense. He should be a novelist; wait a minute--he is. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Top Shelf Productions (September 7, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1891830732
  • ISBN-13: 978-1891830730
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #642,226 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

More About the Author

Alex Robinson
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

› Visit Amazon's Alex Robinson Page

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Tricked
69% buy the item featured on this page:
Tricked 4.5 out of 5 stars (11)
$10.98
Box Office Poison
10% buy
Box Office Poison 4.8 out of 5 stars (36)
$19.77
Too Cool To Be Forgotten
10% buy
Too Cool To Be Forgotten 4.5 out of 5 stars (12)
$11.21
BOP! More Box Office Poison
6% buy
BOP! More Box Office Poison 5.0 out of 5 stars (1)
$9.95
Explore similar items

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 
(4)
(1)
(1)
(1)
See all 6 tags...

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more
 

Customer Reviews

11 Reviews
5 star:
 (7)
4 star:
 (3)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, but . . . , April 4, 2006
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.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Alex, of BOP fame, does it again., November 20, 2005
By Christy Smith "Christy" (With All The Wild Monkeys) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
Thanks to the work of gifted authors and artists the likes of Alex Robinson, the genre known as graphic novel is finally hitting its stride. Each three-dimentional character is brought to life by striking black and white images that accentuate the stark reality of each characters life. You may find yourself looking into this art as you would a mirror, learning from the lessons of its grossly human leads.

Following the lives of six people, Alex Robinson shows what lies at the depths of a reclusive and unproductive former rock legend, a forlorn server (aren't they all?), counterfeit artist, an obsessive crank, an adolescent daughter, and a backstabbing lover. Whose adventures he skips among in chapters presented in a countdown, 49 to 1, that reinforces the story's innate anticipation. They unknowingly stride towards the pulse-pounding climax, spiraling into each other in what can only be described as real life.

If you liked works such as "Blankets" or "Epileptic", you will find this nothing short of remarkable.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars The Indie Film as Graphic Novel, March 10, 2007
By A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
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.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely wonderful!
Alex Robinson at his very best....
Amazing storyline, witty dialogues and complex beautiful characters who cannot let you put this one down... Read more
Published 10 months ago by H. Levy

5.0 out of 5 stars Instantly absorbing 2005 black & white graphic novel
This 350 page Top Shelf graphic novel was written and drawn by Alex Robinson. The complex and engrossing plotline focuses on six individuals whose lives become increasingly... Read more
Published 14 months ago by K. W. Schreiter

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read
The point of views that cycle through are interesting, nice illustrations, shows how we're all connected.
Published 16 months ago by Janet L. Bittner

4.0 out of 5 stars Great characters in overlapping gripping stories
I read "a chapter' of Tricked in the anthology The Best American Comics 2006 (Best American) and knew I HAD read the rest of the book. Very glad I did. Read more
Published 21 months ago by The Upsetter

4.0 out of 5 stars Alex Robinson Does it Again
TRICKED takes a stark turn from Robinson's last book, where frustrated talents struggled to climb the ladder. Read more
Published 22 months ago by B. Wolinsky

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, like a good film
This is a tremendous graphic novel. I am new to the form, and came across the author quite surrendipitously, but it unfolds like a luminous feature film, and the story has... Read more
Published on April 2, 2007 by Mark Dreskin

5.0 out of 5 stars Tricked is not better than Box Office Poison...
It's just as GREAT! How could Alex Robinson have done any better than his 5 star worthy BOP? Does Amazon have six Stars? No, so Tricked isn't better, it's just as GREAT! Read more
Published on December 28, 2005 by Jeff Manley

5.0 out of 5 stars even better than Box Office Poison
Robinson's new book is simply wonderful. It has edge to it, but the characters still fly off the page and you can imagine all the things that happen to them really happening. Read more
Published on August 18, 2005 by Yermo

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   

Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)

Look for Similar Items by Category

Look for Similar Items by Subject

Search Books by subject:











i.e., each book must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...
 

Feedback

If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us.
 Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Is there any other feedback you would like to provide?

Your comments can help make our site better for everyone.


Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.