I just got an email letting me know that Sequart has posted the first review of “DAD!”

Despite the book’s problems, this is, intermittently, a compelling read. This feels like an overambitious first project by a young creator, but I admire both King’s ambition and the way he tackled such an intensely personal issue.

It’s a pretty decent review and even the few not-so nice things said about the book are backed-up to the point that I can see where they are comming from. The full review is posted after the break…

DAD!, by Scott King. This “documentary graphic novel” is an interesting experiment that doesn’t quite work but also has a lot going for it. The story documents the weeks King spent with his seriously ill father before he left to go to graduate school and the guilt he felt in making that decision. He filmed and photographed his family and himself, then changed the effects on the photos to create what looks like highly detailed line drawings. In essence, it’s a variation on fumetti, only much warmer thanks to the way King processed and filtered the images.

What works best about the book is its rawness. King doesn’t hide the stew of emotions he feels regarding his father and the rest of his family. He resents that his father wasn’t really there for him in the way he was for other members of his family. He resents the way his father doesn’t act in the best interests of his own health, as when he gorges himself on food only to quickly get sick. At the same time, King doesn’t present himself in the most flattering of lights either. He makes himself out to be a martyr more often than not, he is often combative and also deliberately irritating to his sister. The rawness of those feelings combined with King deliberately clearing the reader’s palate with descriptions of quotidian tasks like how to make coffee or cook an omelet are the most emotionally powerful moments in the book.

The main problem with the book is that it doesn’t quite hold up as either a book-length documentary, or a nuanced examination of family relationships. The reason is that King tells us up front that this project isn’t about his father or family per se, but rather as a way of dealing with his own feelings of guilt. That lack of ambiguity pervades every page, leading to a great deal of repetition of ideas and themes without really teasing them out further. The long text sections on the specifics of his father’s history of illness are an especially tough slog and seem unnecessary for the purposes of the narrative.

The book works best when it focuses on dialogue; the scene where King’s father has an argument with his daughter, who won’t let him bring his coffee into her car, spoke volumes about the dynamics of the family in a way that obviated King’s own narrative. Indeed, King’s long narrative text section almost seemed redundant; as a reader, we already know this is told from his point of view and his reconstruction of events. Despite the book’s problems, this is, intermittently, a compelling read. This feels like an overambitious first project by a young creator, but I admire both King’s ambition and the way he tackled such an intensely personal issue.