CSotD: Sometimes vicarious is better
Skip to comments
"Guts: A Young Adult Television Fiasco" comes courtesy of a tip at the Comics Reporter, a website I hit every morning which is much more comic-book than comic-strip oriented but is full of fascinating stuff. (This is the first page of the memoir; hit the link to read the whole thing. It's long enough to be satisfying but short enough that you can just go do it now.)
There seem to be quite a lot of what you might call "memoirs of youth" these days, of which this is one, and of which "Smiles" is another, and it's a form that, on the one hand, is necessary if people in their 20s and 30s are going to create confessional memoirs. They don't have that much to draw on, and the people their age who write about their current lives tend to produce self-indulgent mush, given that they haven't had time to process the material. The result is either obvious and bland — "Yes, I remember beer. And sex. Is there a point to this?" — or it's really annoying because it stretches for insights that aren't there yet.
But it is quite possible for a bright, creative person to reach back and recreate moments from their childhood, and if there seems to be a continuing theme of "Adolescence Sucks," well, adolescence does suck. The question is, how much freshness can you bring to that theme?
So the Glass kids went on a radio quiz show and Sean Michael Robinson went on Guts.
It's an interesting little memoir, like a story you'd hear on an airplane. Nothing world-shaking, but it will stick with you, and the next time you're watching one of those stupid action-game-shows, you'll think of it again.
And it makes me want to read the graphic novel he's working on.
Comments 1
Comments are closed.