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Tricked
posted November 17, 2005
 



Creator: Alex Robinson
Publishing Information: Top Shelf, 350 Pages, $19.95, 2005
Ordering Numbers: 1891830732 (ISBN)

Alex Robinson is one of the nicest people in comics, a fact I think plays to his greatest strength as a cartoonist: an ability to create sympathetic and endearing protagonists. Unlike other nice-guy cartoonists with nice-guy comic book stand-ins, Robinson's ability extends up and down the line of all his actors. His secondary protagonists promote a certain amount of rooting just like his primaries; the troubled characters who have an active role are as likely to elicit sympathy as the ones who are more admirable. It's a skill that we're used to seeing applied to serial comic books and the reading patterns they foster more than stand-alone graphic novels.

Tricked works best as a book about multiple decent people -- primarily a waitress with low self-esteem, a young girl wanting to meet her father, and a woman falling in love with a rock star -- all hoping for a happy ending and largely getting one. Their stories are played off against a much more troubled soul trying to divine his place in the world drawing clues from some bizarre touchstones, such as an autographed picture of the aforementioned rock star. That part of the story operates strangely within the wider work. On the one hand, it's made so completely necessary by the general direction of the other stories, but it also feels like the one that works against Robinson's natural impulses. In some ways you can see the plot of Tricked as an almost direct inversion of what Robinson did in his first book, Box Office Poison. After a lot of rambling early the ending to Box Office Poison throttles the reader with its partial pessimism and switch in story focus. The ending of Tricked restores a balance of happiness and purpose to its survivors, and moves the emphasis back on the one character you thought the story might be most about. It doesn't always feel earned as much as Robinson wishing to spare us something uglier.

Tricked is also a more accomplished work than Robinson's debut graphic novel; I can't recall any moments that jar the reader out of the narrative, and the plotlines seem to fit together in more organic fashion. Where the work suffers is that it's just not up to the task of bring across the sweep and complexity its story requires. The rock star material feels made-up, the issues facing a couple of the characters are presented in almost instructional video form ("here is my problem and now I am acting on it"), and worst of all the graphic novel feel totally lacking in its depiction of place. Except for a baseball card store that has the representational realism of a good stage set, the rest of the settings feel like paper backdrops, something painted on a proscenium somewhere. Really sweet characters will drive sales, particularly in this market, but they will not allow for the creation of art that changes minds and truly affects people. If that's where Robinson is aiming, he has a lot of work yet to do.

I also really wish it had a diffferent cover.