Product Description: This epic story of Sherman, Dorothy, Ed, Stephen, Jane, and Mr. Flavor is not to be missed. Alex Robinson's completely natural and inspiring knack for dialogue has made his story of dreary jobs, comic books, love, sex, messy apartments, girlfriends (and the lack thereof), undisclosed pasts, and crusty old professionals one of the most delightful and whimsical graphic novels to hit the stands in years.
Real People, Real Story, Real Art I began reading Box Office Poison in 1995 when it was a Xeroxed mini-comic in the $1-box at Jim Haney's Comics (NYC) and devoured it instantly. I loved the shadowy back and white drawings and the quirky dialogue. All the characters seemed real; they live in shared apartments, have uneasy first dates, and work in jobs they don't like. This was a lot more REAL than MTV's REAL WORLD series. Then again, maybe this comic shows you "the real world" with the overweight guys and girls.
After a childhood of comics with muscle-freaks leaping around in pantyhose, I was glad to find comics where people actually get old and DIE. Robert Crumb drew adult-themed comics for 40 years before his stuff was put in regular bookstores, but Robinson's Box Office Poison can be found in Barnes and Noble. Hopefully the Pubic Libraries will soon stock up on graphic novels, which are finally being taken seriously as literary works.
All I can say is Wow... I read this book (all 600+ pages) in one long sitting and I will definitely be back to read it again and savor it. It's the story of an interwoven group of friends and acquaintances, mostly in early post-college life, in New York in the mid 1990s. The book mostly focuses on Sherman, a frustrated bookstore employee/wannabe writer and Ed, his close friend who aspires to be a comic book artist. Around them orbit a host of characters, from Sherman's roommates Jane and Stephen, to elderly Golden Age comics creator Irving Flavor (Ed's "boss"), to Sherman's kind-of-crazy girlfriend to secondary and tertiary characters who drift in and out.
Alex Robinson has a great talent for both the artwork (he has a knack for individuating his characters so that it was easy to keep them all straight by their appearances) and storytelling. The dialogue and situations are naturalistic and believable, full of small and large real life dramas, struggles, questions and yes, laugh-out-loud funny moments. Every character has moments of showing deep flaws but at the same time nearly every one has a moment or two of deep nobility. Just like people.
I loved the clean black and white art style--I'm a big fan of Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For, and this book reminds me somewhat of her style--very distinct looks for each character, sharp clear images and (it's underrated but a downfall for a lot of indie books)--crisp readable lettering. I'd never make it through 600 pages of poor lettering!
Definitely not for kids (one of the characters introduces himself on page one as someone who you get to see naked a lot and he is not kidding), this is a story that will keep any adult reading and turning pages to find out how these characters' lives turn out. This is one of those graphic novels that I'll not only re-read myself, I'll recommend highly to friends and happily loan it out. Gorgeous work of art and storytelling, and richly deserved every award it won.
This is as good a time as I've had... reading an original graphic novel. I love every one of the 602pgs of this book. thank you, Alex Robinson.
Lacking feeling. There is something wrong with this book. There are many characters that should be interesting, who have interesting situations and back-stories, but they act like paper cut-outs. This book is boring. There is no spark in it, no life or soul or whatever you might call it. Everything in this book just generally falls flat, in my humble opinion.
Friends + Irving Flavor A bunch of recent arts college graduates in NYC: their ups, their downs, tears and laughter. That sums up the weaknesses of this book, which sometimes swings into soap-opera land, but only sometimes.
The great strength of the book is the Irving Flavor character, a grumpy old comic book artist who draw the NightStalker, then got shafted. There's some great nuances to his character, and a wonderful section about his attendance at a comic convention.
I'd liked the experiments with story-telling styles, with disorganized panels, overlapping dialogue, and out-of sync visuals.
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