Un Gentil Garçon

Un Gentil Garçon by Shin'ichi Abe collects eleven short comics originally published between 1970 and 1994. While I don't think it was originally his intention, read together, these stories end up sort of making one story - as for the most part they seem to be autobiographical snippets taken from his & his girlfriend / wife's life.

There's a real mundane weirdness to the stories in here. The character's tend to be inarticulate - the dialog is minimal & unemotive / calm. The drawings vary widely from quite simple and stylish in the beginning, to much more punk and rough, bold and over-excited in the middle, to almost conventional, and finally to just plain crazy bad in the final story (with disturbingly off anatomy). Whatever the style though, even when "bad," the art is always interesting to look at - you can at times see a lot of influence maybe from Yoshiharu Tsuge and Seiichi Hayashi (whose work is being published in English by Drawn and Quarterly this summer, I believe). For the most part the stories center around the raw relationship between the author and his girlfriend, as they drift together and apart and back together again, as he drifts between comics and friends and alcohol. While mostly written from the male perspective, the later, more settled (?) stories in the book switch to the female, which is interesting - as you get the feeling he's writing for her, describing himself - it's a weird feeling.

That's the thing about this book - it keeps you off balance. It's hardly a masterpiece, but it's damn interesting and original. It's a weird one! Definitely glad to have picked it up.