Other Lives

Peter Bagge Other Lives (2010)
I really dislike the term graphic novel because it's mostly just a sales pitch, and when we're talking ten consecutive back issues of Web of Spiderman collected in a hardcover edition, the term comic book is fine, because there's nothing wrong with it being a comic book and we shouldn't have to pretend it's in competition with Brideshead Revisited; but occasionally the cap fits, as it does with Peter Bagge's Other Lives.

Other Lives follows the entangled stories of four individuals with supplementary identities - one swears blind that he's working undercover for the government, another still wrestles with the fucknugget he once was, and the remaining two enjoy illicit virtual hook ups in what may as well be Second Life. They have in common the absurd social circle they all inhabit and a desperate need to be other people, and it's about as funny as cancer - which I state as a quantification of its power rather than a criticism. Some of it actually is sort of funny, as you might expect of the man who brought us Girly Girl and the Goon on the Moon; but the laughs are raw and uncomfortable, with the sheer tragedy of Other Lives rendered truly appalling by the contrast with Bagge's elasticated Looney Tunes inspired artwork. So, as with a good novel, a lot of what you pick up from this thing is delivered in the gaps rather than being anything expressed on the actual page. This leaves us with a novel which probably couldn't exist in any other medium, at least not with anything like the same impact. Bagge really is a living legend.