GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Shenanigans
Yes, the title is “Shenanigans,” with quotation marks already in place. No, I don’t know why. It’s not a direct quote, there’s no place named Shenanigans in the story, and it doesn’t seem to be an ironic “air-quote,” either. (There’s more than one bar in this book that could easily have been named Shenanigans, but none of them actually are.) It’s just an annoying, unnecessary tic.
“Shenanigans” is pleasant but unexceptional, a frothy romantic comedy that I suspect started off as a screenplay and probably would have worked better in filmed form. It takes place in St. Louis, where our creepy main character, Holden, gets kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment at Christmas-time for obsessively playing videogames instead of going out to dinner with her. I’m not sure how old he is; he seems to be a student, but we really don’t get a sense of his normal day-to-day life or a solid idea of what he does for a living. The one thing we see him doing seems like a college work-study program: teaching kids to play hockey. Although…he does seem to sponge off the women in his life, which may be a clue as to his lifestyle.
Holden meets a young woman named Casey, and moves in with her that night. (Help me out here: is that as weird and unrealistic as I think it is, or are twenty-somethings really that friendly these days?) They also sleep in the same bed the night they meet, but don’t have sex, which is just a bizarre combination, especially since the story takes pains to point out that they didn’t have sex. Between the scenes that we see, they drift into something like a normal boyfriend-girlfriend relationship (except for the fact that he’s sponging off her as he did with his last girlfriend), and presumably they start having sex at some point…though the story doesn’t feel the need to explain that point.
Then the story finally starts: Casey has been working as a waitress, but decides to start tutoring college students in math instead. Her qualifications: she’s really really good at mental arithmetic, and she’s totally hot. (No, seriously. There’s no sign that she has a math degree, or anything of that nature. So she seems to be coaching college students in, at best, high-school algebra. My opinion of the fine colleges of St. Louis is still diving as I type this.) Since she’s totally hot, all of her clients are horndog young men who think they’re going to score with her, so her tutoring sessions consist mostly of her edging away from them. She doesn’t seem to realize this, which I suppose makes her some sort of idiot savant…or maybe not a savant. Speaking of not realizing things, her advertisements are clearly based on those for prostitutes, which Holden instantly realized (well, he would, wouldn’t he?), but Casey just doesn’t see.
Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Danger Will Robinson! Alarums and excursions! Better watch out, better not cry, better not pout…Beware! Mayday! Here there be dragons! Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead…
Via Warren Ellis and 
Graeme McMillan of The Savage Critics discovers the single best panel of the week (see above) and 
won the 2005 Goscinny Prize for Best Script and was the Best Book of the Year for 2006 at the Angouleme comics festival, so I have to assume that it’s one of the very best European works of recent years. Which is unfortunate, since I found it only moderately successful.
It would be silly if I didn’t enjoy being a comics and popular culture mini-mogel. It’s fun to have movie stars call you up; that just happened. Getting into movie screenings is swell. People give you cool stuff. I’ve been friends with Will Eisner and Dick Sprang, and Dick Giordano was at my birthday party last week. I get to work with my closest friends, with people I respect, and with folks with whom I am in awe. Coupled with my fantastic, loving family, I live out Randy Newman’s great song from 1983: My Life is Good.
So now that I’ve turned 57, I once again find myself in the middle of another “summer” comics convention season. In the past couple months we ComicMix folk have been to, oh, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Long Island, San Diego, Chicago, four or five different shows in New York City, and probably a couple I’m temporarily forgetting. I’ve still got Tarrytown NY, Baltimore MD, and Columbus Ohio to go this year, along with at least one other show in Manhattan. And one thought has been clattering against my brainpan for the last several weeks:
The Big ComicMix Broadcast winds up Wizard World Chicago with a roll of the dice and an in-depth look at the many sides of the new gaming product previewed here at the show – from the new 24 game based on the TV show to a peek at the 40th Annual GenCon starting up ion just a few days. And did you know there is a red hot new pro wrestling organization that is on TV and toy shelves but isn’t spelled W-W-E? Then it’s a a quick shot from the Planet of the Apes guy from the day when he used to travel with a different bunch.
The London Sun reports Oscar winning Sir Ben Kingsley is in "final" negotiations to join Doctor Who this coming season to play Davros, the man behind (and later inside) The Daleks.
