The Con Artists: Luke Healey

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It’s a nice, short read and I appreciate the layers Healey is trying to peel back and deconstruct but I don’t feel like I would be reading it over either as an autobiographical work or as a portrayal of mental health. 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. Healy gives the characters space to breathe, to allow the reader the space to sit and think with them. The con here goes both ways, one rather obvious to whomever is not the main character, and one much subtler, revealed awkwardly in one panel. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics.

Giorgio is a nightmare patient, as demanding as a hotel guest, for all that it’s in his house that they’re staying. Snippets from Frank’s middling stand-up routines are punctuated by the subtle farce of Healy’s mise-en-scène and the lively, at times scathingly pointed, banter of old friends. There's something very real about The Con Artists that makes it feel nuanced while also being a bit unsatisfyng in places.We anticipate that part of the miss assessment of the themes of the book is attributable to two of the main characters being aspiring comedians.

A mordantly funny cautionary tale, and an incisive look at the boundaries of self-presentation and self-preservation. The Con Artists is a graphic novel exploring themes relating to mental illness, strained relationships, and artists using stories from their lives as part of their art. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. 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.That part was a little confusing because a lot of this graphic novel is Frankie talking about his mental illness. The Con Artists seems to be trying to tell a story that makes the reader question what is real and what is imagined (a story about stories!

It’s worried Frank, not Giorgio, who asks this question, but almost immediately he begins to regret the offer. I liked the art and the main character a lot and felt like they were able to stand up for themselves in the end. 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. Frank only wanted three things this year— to perform stand-up comedy, go to therapy, and to keep his house plants alive. When it comes to the portrayl of mental illness you can tell it's something the author has experience with, though I didn't love the somewhat dissmissive epilogue.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. Frank is willfully antisocial yet lonely, a paradox that haunts the millennial generation, well reflected in The Con Artists. Giorgio is a jerk who makes bad decisions and seems to be full of half-cocked money-making schemes, but Frank sticks by him. Frank and Giorgio, the two men at the heart of it, are brilliant, vivid creations, and the passive-aggressive scratchiness between them is so beautifully observed. Pretty brutal Goodreads average here for what I deem well done comics, sort of minimal, with barely tolerable main characters who are essentially conning each other in different ways.