One must, it is to be supposed, admire a book so dogged in illustrating the adventures of a thoroughly unlikeable human being. It is an especial marvel to find that book, at least in some fashion, a roman à clef, concerned with tracing the arc of a simulacrum homunculus through a landscape of thinly veiled autobiographical humiliations. However, it also remains a fact that comics has never boasted a shortage of sick freaks.
On the spectrum of such sick freaks, Luke Healy surely rates among the more benign specimens. He’s extraordinarily unhappy, that much is plain, and, at least at the beginning of the story, has grown into a churlish species of narcissistic distraction. If one accepts the conceit that the cartoonist’s illustrated doppelgänger reflects to some degree the personal situation of the artist, howsoever exaggerated for emphasis that depiction may be, then we are left with a portrait of a man wracked by anxiety. At the root of that anxiety simmers a toxic stew of fear, guilt, and self-loathing, owing to circumstances both cosmic and intimate. The sum of these stymied impulses is a man frozen in place, unable to move forward. This leads to the question resting at the heart of the book: how much of that stagnation can be accounted his personal fault (the natural outcome of poor decisions and maladaptive behavior), and how much is due to a rational response to the same collapsing world system plaguing us all?
Oh, that old chestnut. We’re used to hearing by now, already, the strangely ubiquitous strain of magical thinking that projects a preoccupation with ecological breakdown as simply a coping strategy to avoid thinking about another, more tangible breed, of real problems. On the other hand, at the end of the day, we’re still responsible for ourselves, until the end of the world and beyond. Both ideas can coexist in the brain at once, with nuance, but not without friction. The resulting torsion can be enough to tear a body down, and Luke Healy offers a first-hand glimpse of that torturous dynamic.
It’s right there in the title, Self Esteem and the End of the World, courtesy of our friends at Drawn & Quarterly. From the title, the book could be mistaken for a wellness brochure free at the doctor’s office. The matter-of-fact descriptiveness with which Healy lays out a map of the thematic territory seems quite native to the moment, a descriptive title written in plain Helvetica across the top of the cover illustration. It appears of be an adaptation of the variety of corporatist agitprop masquerading as the kind of self-help literature Healy consumes at a rapid clip. It’s a kind of addiction that presents a measurable drag on Healy’s life: self-harm through the endless recitation of “I’m OK, you’re OK.” It doesn’t help that basically he’s listening to his own voice recite these bromides, in the form of his twin brother, employed as a narrator for self-help audiobooks.
The style in which the book is drawn can only, and charitably, be described as a downstream consequence of Chris Ware. The problem with Ware’s influence over a large cohort of the cartoonists rising in his wake seems to dwell in the observation that Ware’s influential style is a self-imposed limitation. He can draw normal if he wants to, or even weird - pick up any of the sketchbooks, or pick up Quimby the Mouse. But it’s those limitations that really got the people going, a strangely fecund sterility. Achewood wouldn’t exist without those shackles, arguably, but neither would Nick Drnaso.
So we find ourself of two minds in the matter, which certainly makes sense. To be frank, I didn’t find the book particularly enjoyable while reading. The art is purposefully unappealing and the story takes a while to come together. Ultimately, I believe it does come together, overcoming a rather aimless initial chunk on its way to a more substantive finale. After closing the book and walking around for a while, Healy’s work lingering on my palette, I found myself more kindly disposed.
As discussed, the book features the adventures of a character, Luke Healy, negotiating life in a dank and fruitless present bleeding into a vast future of uncertain vibe. We begin with a petty anecdote, related to being passed over for the duties of best man for his twin brother’s wedding. It makes sense, certainly, considering the version of Healy we’re offered is both shiftless and adrift, overwhelmed by the titular Scylla and Charybdis of modernity - does anything I do matter while perched on the lip of cataclysm?
The book advances into the future, with Healy distancing himself from cartooning and accepting less satisfying but more remunerating positions in the field of corporate media and telemarketing. Possibly the book’s best conceit involves a smart pillow that tracks how much time Healy spends sitting at his desk. He spends a camping trip in the Greek islands walking around with the pillow strapped to his ass to disguise his gallivant, meanwhile the GPS tracker in the pillow updates Healy’s precise location at every step. On such mundane and violent intrusions are the warp and woof of modern life illuminated. Another, saner, country than the United States might pass laws to prevent such immoral overreach, and in time we may even do the same. Barring the political will to actually improve anything in the immediate term however we’re left with the imperative merely to keep our heads above water as every single thing that matters is chipped away.
The final section of the book pulls together strings from earlier passages, deftly laid, into a rather improbable metafictional conceit. Against the bounds of all common sense, the mad rush to adapt every comic book property in existence leads to one of Healy’s earliest stories being adapted into a big budget motion picture. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales is appended in its entirety to the end of the back, and it’s a better comic than you might expect if your first exposure is the farcical retelling that immediately precedes it. Frankly it’s got more life than the main event, showcasing the influence of Hergé and Porcellino in one, both still present but subsumed in the modern Healy.
Of course, the larger joke here is already a little dated, inasmuch as the idea of improbably obscure non-superhero comic books sparking movie deals based on gossamer enthusiasm already seems an artifact of another time. We live in a post-Madam Web world, and her failure connects us all.
Healy and his mother, serving as his unofficial sidekick through much of the narrative, arrive in Palm Springs for the filming. Healy gets Palm Springs right; a strange desert enclave split between petulant nouveau riche and long-suffering gays, with casinos straddling the horizon in every direction. In the near future the coasts are flooding and the movie making apparatus has moved inland, although the mechanism behind such changes are unelaborated. Really, they don’t require much in the way of elaboration: we all know the score. Everything is going to shit everywhere but the grating exigencies of modern life remain unabated. The news attests to the principle that the powers that be would rather break the arms and the legs of every child in the nation than concede one iota of the bare principle of institutional authority. And now Palm Springs is lost under the rising sea. Ah, well.
Where does that leave Mr. Healy? Trapped in a funhouse mirror where his minicomic has improbably been made into the grist of a strange studio production that, he strongly suspects, has slowly morphed into a cringing mockumentary on the subject of Healy himself. When presented the opportunity to act out the destructive impulse of his frustrations he demurs. Is it personal growth? I won’t rule out the possibility, and neither will he. That’s not nothing!
