Tricked by Alex Robinson
#70 in my book challenge for the year, Tricked was a disappointment. It was one of the hyped graphic novels after the San Diego comic convention. I very much enjoyed Robinson’s previous series, Box Office Poison, which has been collected in a lovely edition by Top Shelf Productions. Some of what I liked about BOP was evident here, such as Robinson’s distinctive and iconic art, his snappy dialogue and the characters that are so well developed and true to life that I kept feeling like if I didn’t actually know them, I knew someone just like them. But Tricked fell apart for me under the weight of its central plot. Six characters’ stories are told alternately, until all of them come together near the end for a big occurrence. Few things about Tricked surprised me, and several things annoyed me. One character, an unstable loser who has stopped taking his meds, is supposed to be unlikeable. But he gets so much story and so many pages that he still becomes wearing. The most central character is Ray Beam, a jerk of a former music star who still milks his fame even though he’s been creatively inactive for years. A third is a guy who makes a living forging sports paraphernalia. It’s hard, but not impossible, to pull off a story that centers on an unlikeable character. But to have fully half of the main cast of six be unlikeable made the story often hard to engage with. Further, the other three main characters are all good-hearted women, so the story feels artificially balanced. If you loved Box Office Poison, there is much to like here, but if you haven’t read Robinson’s work before, I recommend starting with BOP before giving Tricked a try.