When people that don’t read comics ask me what it is about them that is still appealing to me as an adult, one of the answers is their serialized nature. As with favorite TV shows, when you get to know and love characters, the fact that new adventures featuring these characters are available year-round (or until a creative team changes for the worse) only adds to the allure. Even better, when you come to love a writer’s work, the short wait between their last offering and their next is manageable, unlike the wait between novels (I imagine many Harry Potter fans have already poured through THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE and are already counting the hundreds and hundreds of days before the next one).

Still, novels take a while to read—with comics and the relatively quick read they offer, having to wait a long time between books from favorite writers can be almost physically painful. So what am I supposed to do with this Alex Robinson character?

Alex is the writer/artist of BOX OFFICE POISON, one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read, in twenty-some years of reading comics. In fact, I spent maybe 5,000 words saying so in a piece for Ain’t It Cool News.com a few years ago. And since reading that book (and pushing it on everyone I knew, especially the non-comics readers among us), I’ve been waiting for more from Alex. (With that one, it was serialized as comics before being collected; TRICKED is a stand-alone graphic novel only.) His characters are so real, so fully drawn (I don’t mean on paper, in this regard, although his skill with facial expressions and panel compositions conveys emotion better than most artists around) that other slice-of-life comics all just pale before his work. So I’ve been waiting.

Working in comics like I have been, the simple pleasures of reading comics for fun are harder to find. But word of Alex’s new graphic novel, TRICKED, being available from Top Shelf Comics at the recently concluded San Diego Comic Con (it’s available at Amazon.com and comic shops next month) had me pretty excited. After a hectic five days spent with really no time to peruse the wares at the con, I did at least manage to steal away and grab a copy from Top Shelf, so I consider the show a success in that regard.

No, my problem isn’t with the book. My dilemma is how I can possibly wait years for another book from Robinson.

I read TRICKED, all 348 pages of it, in one day. Couldn’t help myself. Every page I read, I kept thinking I should put the book down, save it, savor it. But I couldn’t put it down. It’s hard to qualify these things, so I won’t rank this ahead of or just behind BOX OFFICE POISION (and really, why bother with a ranking system? Suffice it to say that both of the books are equally excellent. I can already tell you that my bookcase was a lesser place before TRICKED.

The thing Robinson has managed to do even more than in BOP is get inside the heads of a more diverse cast of characters. The ad copy for the book read thusly:

Actually, the copy doesn’t quite have it right, really—there’s an act of violence toward the end (couple of ‘em, actually) but even before that, the lives of these characters were intertwining in meaningful ways. We meet all the characters separately, but as they move into each other’s lives, these movements never feel forced; they happen organically, the way life does. The way Alex maneuvers his characters in and out of each other’s lives is masterful, again even more of an accomplishment than BOX OFFICE POISON since these characters are all strangers to each other as the book opens.

The book opens on Ray, the famous front man of a band that disintegrated a decade ago. Since then, Ray has one solo record and an ever-increasing array of self-doubt writer’s block behind him. He’s entered into a Rivers Cuomo-like phase (or Brian Wilson, if you prefer) of seclusion, until he meets Lily, a wide-eyed girl who works in publicity for Ray but doesn’t really know or care much about him or his band.

There’s also Nick, a guy who leads his wife to think he has a respectable job but instead works as a counterfeiter in a sports memorabilia store, forging autographs on baseballs and on jerseys, under the auspices of his crooked Russian boss. Robinson said in a TRICKED interview that Nick was the hardest character for him to write, and it shows. Whenever books alternate between different characters’ narratives, as I discussed in my review of Nick Hornby’s new novel, you always have favorites. I mostly wanted to get through Nick’s tale and get back to Ray and Lily (a bored, rich singer possibly re-discovering his muse trumps a small-time forge every time), at least until Nick’s story started to intersect with some of the other characters in the book. Still, when it looked like there would be the aforementioned act of violence in the book, I had hopes that it’d happen to Nick instead of the others. Not that Alex checked with me before taking the book in the direction he intended… but I had hopes.

Another character that was a bit hard to care as much about, at the start, was Phoebe, because at the start she was just a young, innocent and naïve blonde girl from the Midwest (again, rock star debauchery trumps wide-eyed innocence, too). But as I got deeper into Phoebe’s story (she left New Mexico in search of her father, who abandoned her years ago. It works out nicely that her father owns the restaurant where our next character, Caprice, works. Caprice is the only character in TRICKED to have first appeared in BOX OFFICE POISON (although she’s not married here, but that makes no difference). She’s the slightly heavy (Robinson’s scratchy, deceptively simple-looking art is great at conveying body size differences as well as facial expressions) girl who is insecure about her place in the world. A bad break-up has left her doubtful about relationships, so much so that she goes out of her way to attempt to sabotage a new, seemingly meaningful, one that she develops here.

Finally, we have Steve, the lynch-pin of this book and the most insane character Robinson has written. Well, most obviously insane, anyway. Steve is a music lover to a fault, castigating anyone who dares to disagree with him. And this is when he’s on his medication. When he goes off his medication… well, Steve gets worse. Much worse.

The great thing about the book, and about Robinson, is that he’s not afraid to make any of characters casually unlikable. Just when you begin to think Ray means well with Lily, he makes a stupid, and human, move or two. When you see Caprice making a really bad decision, you want to yell at her the same way you want to tell some friends that they’re being stupid. And they don’t listen any more than Caprice does. Finally, when the act of violence approaches, you know that it could happen to any of these characters, since this book isn’t following the structure of expected storytelling as much as it’s telling a real, human story, as unpredictable as life itself. When that scene arrived in the book, I held on the page for a while—I’d just spent over 300 pages getting to know and care about these characters, and the potential loss of one (or more) of them was something I’d been dreading. Not too many books give me pause simply because I’m so involved in the characters that I want to live with them a little longer before maybe losing them. This book accomplished that (and some welling-up from my sappy ass, too) as well.

Art-wise, TRICKED is very similar to BOX OFFICE POISON, although Robinson’s art isn’t quite as angular as last time around. As I say, the cartoonish aspect of his art is deceiving and deserves acclaim of its own. The simple act of adding lines around his characters’ eyes makes them so much more expressive than other styles of this nature. And his use of shadows and multiple panels conveys mood and movement better than most b&w or color comics.

Can you tell I liked the book? Since taking the IDW gig a year ago, I’ve rarely reviewed comics in this space—I try not to either talk up friends’ work or downplay the competition’s offerings. But TRICKED supercedes either of these concerns—much like with BOX OFFICE POISON, I just want you to go check it out. Read it now, so that when it’s mentioned on numerous Year-End Best-Of lists, you’ll be that much farther ahead of the game.

Speaking of working ahead, Alex, I can’t possibly wait another three-and-a-half years for a new book, man. To use an comparison that people will only understand after reading this book, your work is the Lily to the Ray of the comic industry. Hurry back with more inspiration.

To read more about Alex Robinson and TRICKED (328 pages, $19.95, ISBN # 1-891830-73-2), check out Alex’s Web site. Thanks, too, to Top Shelf’s Brett Warnock (nice job on the book design, Brett!) and Chris Staros, too.

/chris

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