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Indlæser... David Chelsea in Love (1993)af David Chelsea
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Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. I picked this up for a buck. I thought the art was pretty and the story readable, but I came away from this memoir with an undying hatred for crazy Minnie, David's lady love. I think she ought to spend 200 pages in service to a cruel pony-master who makes her go high-stepping around the room while he lazily flicks a whip at her tush. That might make up for the way I felt by the time I finally got to the end of this book. The seemingly endless chronicle of a crazy relationship with a crazy woman, from a crazy man's point of view. But it's very readable, and compelling even in the face of repetition and some predictability. To give the author credit, his character is only 21 in the book, and it's not like he should be a model of maturity. Chelsea's style here is sort of 'government pamphlet' school of cartooning, which I have always liked, and he employs enough variation in layout and narrative flow to keep it dynamic. ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)741.5973The arts Graphic arts and decorative arts Drawing & drawings Cartoons, Caricatures, Comics Collections North American United States (General)LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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The book is about young David, aspiring illustrator in Manhattan from Portland in the '80s, pretentious and needy and horny, age 20 going on 45. (Autobio-review note: I first saw this book when I was 20 and in Manhattan, but after one look, I couldn't stand to read it; I identified too much, except he knew how to get laid a lot.) The "love" in the title is pretty much sex and arguments, with a series of careless and/or damaged women - almost everyone David knows is as selfish as he is, though some of them have a better grasp of the world. He bounces around between cities and beds and is constantly surprised by betrayals the reader sees coming a mile away, including his own. Once he gets into something like a feasible relationship, the book slows down and then leaves off in a hurry, with a postscript to let you know he's now wiser and married.
This is all nearly as awful as it sounds, except that it's extremely well written and drawn, and funny - basically a compassionate-but-merciless satire of a particular floating world, a little like Martin Amis's [b: The Rachel Papers|18828|The Rachel Papers|Martin Amis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403172672s/18828.jpg|1981277] and nearly as good, lacking only a plot. Chelsea has a great ear for dialogue, using it to sketch out the characters right away, and as obnoxious as they are, he gives you enough of their point of view to make it more than just "David vs. the Crazy Girls." And even without a plot, there's a good sense of time going by as other people in his crowd move on with their lives. It's all well supported by the art, which looked unusual then and still does: realistic and precise with a great individuality to the faces and bodies and environments, and skillfully laid out, but just unpolished enough to make it look like something made in an obsessive spree by a young guy not sure of what tools to use.
In one funny scene that might or might not have been intended as self-satire, David tries to sell an early version of his comic to a magazine that's clearly supposed to be Spiegelman's Raw, and he can't understand why those snotty elitists won't publish his work. He doesn't get that they're just doing a totally different thing - his story would've looked ridiculously out of place in Raw. But there was a lot of that mistake going around then, the idea that "good comics" was just one big genre that would all fit together somehow. I'm glad it's not like that, and if misfit critters may hop out of the weeds with just one story to tell, I say bring them on. ( )