11/22/2022
I picked up “Heaven No Hell” by at the bookstore on Fulton, I was really drawn to the art style.
What I love most about this piece is the ridiculous, colorful, and hilarious imagination behind each of the stories. This book is made of 17 different stories, each with completely different plots but similar themes. There’s a kind of recognizable mischievousness in the writing thats reflected in the characters, narration, or story.
These were my favorite stories:
“One of my students is a murderer but which?”
In this story, Ms Renauld, an undercover agent disguised as a substitute teacher, infiltrates an elementary school classroom to solve the mystery behind three child murders. The premise itself is hilariously dark. Children killing children, presented in a cute and candid way
“Album”
This is a series of pictures of the subject’s mother throughout her life, in various situations. In one panel, she’s hitting her classmate, in another she’s volunteering at a community garden. Some of the photos are of the mother beyond her lifespan, like 500 years ago or 50 years after. It was a beautiful way to portray a life and its existence beyond the living years.
“Raised”
In this comic, a couple uses an app to see what their potential child would look like. The app starts to change the appearance of their future child with every adjustment to their relationship. If one of them goes back to school to finish their MFA, their child has better fashion sense. If they give the child the mothers last name, it has an awful haircut, and so on. This one made me laugh. All the stories do, but I thought of this one as particularly funny.
If you like existential stories, funny mysteries, and creative hypotheticals, I highly recommend this book. After reading it through, I decided that my next comic book purchase would be Birds of Maine because of how much I loved this one
