Because You Want to Book Club #13: "Lucky"

When it comes to graphic novel publishing, I have to admit that I am predisposed to at least give anything that Drawn and Quarterly puts out. Unfortunately, being poor means that I don’t have much of a chance to purchase any graphic novels on my own and I have to rely on the selection available to me at the public library, which limits me to the works of Chris Ware (who I like but I have already read all that the library has) and “Lucky” by Gabrielle Bell. If anyone has a copy of Adrian Tomine’s “Shortcomings” I would love to borrow it since I am dying to know how the story ends.

“Lucky” is the autobiographical musings of Bell and her life in Brooklyn. Barely living above the poverty level, Bell lives out her mundane and humdrum life. There are three main stories in “Lucky” because it is a book comprised of three comics. The first deals with her boyfriend having trouble finding an apartment or rooming house in the city. The second is essentially some lightly strung together ramblings that Bell wrote after losing her original manuscript for the second comic at an airport in San Francisco, and the third is about two less than ideal jobs she was pretty much forced to take to make ends meet.

The only word that I can use to describe “Lucky,” for better or worse is mundane. Bell has a flair for creating dialog that crackles even when everything in the panel is decidedly bland; these are real people facing real issues. The biggest problem is that it is almost too real and half of the book is barely interesting at all. The first story is the best in my eyes and is necessary to understand who Gabrielle is as a person (and to a lesser extent her boyfriend) before delving into the next two stories. The second story is a hodgepodge of different anecdotes with very little context, and even thought it might be intentional, I just can’t really get into it. The third story (which is the award winning one of the three) is half good (the first half where Bell becomes paranoid that the woman she is working for will steal her ideas) and half dreadful (where she tries to teach two privileged brats French). The half that works is super, but then the wheels feel like they have just fallen off. The artwork is quite beautifully rendered, as well.

In the end there is enough here to make me want to revisit Bell’s work and make a judgment based off something other than “Lucky.”

Grade: C-