Nina Bunjevac

Wow, this was short. This is something you'll read in under fifteen minutes.

There's just not an awful lot there. It's a simple story about a compulsive masturbator who grows up to be a voyeur and subsequently a criminal - one of those "the cigarette leads to the joint leads to the pill leads to the needle" narratives. There is no attempt made to plumb the mind of this character; in fact, the character doesn't seem to have a mind at all, just sort of sleepwaking from one panel to the next.

Speaking of panels, each one is a single page, often with a blank facing page. No narrative, thought, or speech ballons. No panel-by-panel action sequences. No WHAM! effects. In many ways, this is not a comic book or a graphic novel: it's a series of illustrations accompanied by a minimal amount of expository text. That's not a plus or a minus, just a description and perhaps an explanation of why this goes by so quickly.

The art is excellent, if a little porn-y. It can be distracting at times: I found myself wondering if the textured shading was due to a skillful use of a textured surface under the paper, or simply a fill plugin in some graphics software. I suppose it shouldn't matter, as it makes the characters look like lizards, but this is more respectable as a failed experimental technique than as an easily-changed software setting. There's always going to be one who says "but this is the point! the lizard skin just reinforces the inhumanity of the characters!", but I am neither convinced nor impressed.

There's an afterword, which probably took longer to read than the graphic novel. It bore no discernible relation to the book, the events described therein were neither shocking nor surprising, nor really interesting for that matter, but I guess these sort of "bad things happened to me in my youth" confessionals are in vogue at the moment, so everyone's gotta have one to provide some purported context to their work. I'm not going to wade into the fray on whether everyone's story needs to be told, or whether every perspective is unique and valuable, or whether victimhood should be celebrated or eradicated. I am simply going to say: Let your work stand on its own merits.… (meer)

OMG! Having not even read the back cover, I knew nothing about the contents of this book, and boy was I gobsmacked! This book is intended to shock, so I'm going to be using spoiler warnings for most of this review. I will say that this book made me very uncomfortable, and I'm having difficulty processing what the author is trying to say and why she chose to tell the story the way she has.

So, in an ancient time, a priestess comes wailing about her problems to a meditating Bezimena (a goddess? a sage?), who is just not in the mood for it today and decides, you want something to cry about? I'll give you something to cry about.

With a quick push from Bezimena, the priestess is instantly reincarnated in the early 20th century as a boy named Benny who compulsively masturbates. It's sort of hilarious . . . until the sexually explicit rape scenes begin. Presented ambiguously at first as highly unlikely consensual fantasy role play between the now-grown man and a woman he knew in school and her friends, there is an erotic charge to the gorgeous illustrations, but then the ambiguity is stripped away and it is revealed that not only were the sex acts definitely rape, the rape victims were actually children. (I described this plot to my wife and daughter and was met with much disbelief and bewilderment.)

So we have a deep dive into the psyche of a delusional serial rapist that seems intended to make the reader complicit in the assaults by titillating and then condemning voyeuristic tendencies, using pornography to criticize pornography as it were. We have eroticized rape used to portray the horror of rape. And we also have a weirdly retroactive romanticized view of the pedophile, à la Humbert Humbert, as Benny devoutly follows and acts out the desires he believes the object of his affection has outlined for him in a notebook he finds, that comes crashing down when we are presented with the crime scene photos of dead naked girls and the real notebook's childish drawings. These are troubling and shocking choices that make one question why this book exists even as you have to acknowledge it as an undeniable work of art -- a highly disturbing and controversy-courting work of art.

I have trouble though connecting the framing sequence with Bezimena to the main story. There is mention of a Greek myth on the back cover (which I finally looked at when I was trying to figure out what I had just read), but it doesn't seem to really apply to the priestess. She's whining about how much she is suffering because someone is desecrating her temple, so let's genderswap her into a pedophile? What kind of sense does that make?

Frankly, in trying to understand this book, I found myself resorting too often to pop psychology analysis of the author, which she invites with an afterword detailing her own experience with sexual assaults, one of which involved a Judas goat, a slightly older teenage girl, who led her to a videotaped encounter with an adult male. This book is a tool to help her process that trauma, obviously, and quite effectively offloads a portion of that processing onto the reader.

I'm torn between giving this book a one-star rating for being in poor taste and a five-star rating for pushing boundaries. I'll split the difference today, but I know I'll be thinking about this book for a while and may not settle on my true rating for a long time.

Trigger warnings: rape, graphic and explicit depiction of sexual acts (NC-17 or beyond)… (meer)

Benny es un joven como los demás. De buena familia, con una buena educación, no le falta de nada. Y sin embargo... es diferente. Benny mira a las muchachas de una manera muy extraña. En su cabeza toman forma obsesiones innombrables. Tanto, que quizá le resulte difícil vivir en sociedad.

Nina Bunjevac es una de las autoras de cómic e ilustradoras más respetadas en la actualidad, cuya obra ha sido comparada con la de Marjane Satrapi, Robert Crumb o Joe Sacco. En este cuento negro para adultos nos conduce, sin concesiones ni tabúes, por el camino poco transitado de la psicología del agresor sexual.… (meer)