Review: Red Eye, Black Eye

Red Eye, Black Eye
By K. Thor Jensen
Published by Alternative Comics. $19.95 USD

Dumped, downsized and evicted, K. Thor Jensen hits the road for two months to sort himself out and visit a lot of his comix pals, many of whom he knows only through the Internet. The purpose of any road trip story is some sort of growth or change for the main character, and while Jensen wisely avoids any grand epiphanies, it's satisfying enough that when he gets back to NYC, where he started, he realizes he's missed it. Oddly enough, I was just flipping through the book again after reading it months ago and seeing he actually says he's had no "grand epiphanies," so I guess it stuck with me.

Jensen gets pretty much everything right in this book. His artistic style isn't special but it's efficient in a chunky, no-frills, Tom Hart way, and that suits the bluntness of his character. Jensen doesn't write so that his faces have to sell big emotions--more often it's a line of dialogue that punctuates a scene. Jensen is also very funny throughout, and includes enough mishaps that it's hard not to be sympathetic towards his character. Finally, he structures the book as a series of short episodes--each chapter is a visit to a different place and friend(s). It keeps the book lively and the few sub-par chapters are no big deal because they're all short and never really mentioned again. It's just on to the next one.

This book--whether you call it a graphic novel or nonfiction or travelogue or slice-of-life, is one of the least pretentious, non-envelope-pushing books around, but I also feel like it'll end up being one of my favorites of the year. It's a lot of good stories, some good laughs, guided by a humble but capable cartoonist who really has the goods. It's not a book you give to friends to show them what the medium can achieve. You give it to them because it's really good and almost anyone will find something of interest here.