The Con Artists: Luke Healey

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Given this comic is semi-autobiographical (the symbolism of the glued-on moustache is hard to avoid) we describe Frank cautiously, lest Mr Healy ever reads this review. Nonetheless, there is something entirely sad about Frank’s lacklustre tilts at the windmill of live comedy. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. But it’s a tender, intimate story, too, one in which long-repressed love and competitiveness bubble up as if from nowhere.

It’s worried Frank, not Giorgio, who asks this question, but almost immediately he begins to regret the offer. A funny, bittersweet story about Frank, a stand-up comedian with anxiety, who gets caught up in taking care of an estranged friend, Giorgio, while he recovers after being hit by a bus. Frank is willfully antisocial yet lonely, a paradox that haunts the millennial generation, well reflected in The Con Artists. The most enjoyable aspect of this book for me were Healy's illustrations, which were really charming. I think this was a really great portrayal of mental illness, and hard or toxic relationships, but that’s about it.Giorgio is a nightmare patient, as demanding as a hotel guest, for all that it’s in his house that they’re staying. The Con Artists’ art style is clean and legible, and the writing has many standout jokes and profound lines that linger on the mind. There were many, many things to unpack, and while they were quite interesting, I don't feel we got the time or attention needed to get into them. But by using our main character (Frank), he crafts a tale of failure in young adulthood and why growing apart from someone isn't always a bad thing. I enjoyed Luke Healy's Americana, a memoir of Luke taking his Irish self to the West Coast of the US to complete an arduous hike.

Frank only wanted three things this year— to perform stand-up comedy, go to therapy, and to keep his house plants alive. I might as well come come straight to the point: The Con Artists by Luke Healy is my favourite graphic novel of the year so far, and to be honest, it might just be among my favourite comics ever. If you are a vulnerable person, you hang on to that someone all the more tightly, certain that this someone will be there for you when others haven't. Healy is one of those very noticing artists, and the great pleasure of his deeply satisfying fourth book, which is about an old friendship that will shortly curdle, lies in small things: little details you may not notice the first time around; ambiguities that nag away at you.He can be hilarious, and if you are even slightly tired of the current craze elsewhere in the literary world for thinly disguised autobiography (out of which, having cleverly given one of his characters a false moustache, he gently takes the piss), then I think this minor masterpiece of a book might be for you. The simple art style really helps to ground what could easily otherwise become a pretty heavy story. Healy opens this with a section declaring this as TOTALLY FICTION, NOTHING to do with ME and then interrupts the story half way to take a break and reassert that this is TOTALLY fiction, so that is funny.

Healy’s pilgrimage through America is also a journey into his own mind, soundtracked by blistered footsteps and breathless huffs, and told with winning honesty. The spare art style suited the story well, and while this wasn't as hilarious as I was expecting, it was a good character study with some pretty funny moments. It’s almost sinister, the way he insists that Frank washes his hair or cuts up his dinner – and there’s something else, too. It isn’t hard at all to imagine such frenemies as the stars of some future film or TV series, though personally I would be quite content if Healy would only give them another outing between hard covers. The many characters sitting within the comics that this critic has read and reviewed over the past year, have not evoked the same sense of revilement that Giorgio did by the conclusion of the story.

Healy's pilgrimage through America is also a journey into his own mind, soundtracked by blistered footsteps and breathless huffs, and told with winning honesty. The book observes how much resentment builds between them, in their differing attitudes to purpose, privilege and self-presentation.