The Con Artists: Luke Healey

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Healy's strikingly simple black/white/grey line-drawn panels belie a complex examination of the eponymous con artists, clouded by self-delusion, enabled by social media. I do understand that it's supposed to be an exploration of mental illness and toxic friendships, and that it doesn't make sense in real life, but narrative-wise, it felt kind of. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The book observes how much resentment builds between them, in their differing attitudes to purpose, privilege and self-presentation. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

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.Moving in with and caring for his estranged childhood friend quickly starts to chip away at Frank’s sense of self, as well as Giogio’s carefully curated online persona. One of the funniest books you will ever read…’ -Irish Times ‘A quietly brilliant story of old friends and secret lives.

I think this was a really great portrayal of mental illness, and hard or toxic relationships, but that’s about it. Nonetheless, there is something entirely sad about Frank’s lacklustre tilts at the windmill of live comedy. Frank only wanted three things this year- to perform stand-up comedy, go to therapy, and to keep his house plants alive. It’s almost sinister, the way he insists that Frank washes his hair or cuts up his dinner – and there’s something else, too. 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 central question that animates ‘The Con Artists’ is: what does it mean to watch someone struggle? The Con Artists is a graphic novel about mental health and friendship, with the backdrop of a comedy club - literally. We wondered whether given Frank’s considerable anxieties of Giorgio’s state of mind and living arrangements Giorgio might have once been an object of Frank’s affections, but there is no other suggestion of this within the comic.

Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. The topics about mental health, and the reality of the main character's thoughts while experiencing a panic attack and other mental health issues to me were spot on.

This was an interesting concept and the simple art style was nice, but it just didn’t quite do it for me. I just could not care why the dweeb kept hanging around with the asshole or what they'd get up to next. 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.

Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Moving in with and caring for his estranged childhood friend quickly starts to chip away at Frank's sense of self, as well as Giogio's carefully curated online persona. We appreciate that comedians, at least in our experience, often use comedy to master and anxieties, as a way of venting or exploring the things that trouble them in their personal lives.In many ways, that’s the story The Con Artists seeks to tell, is the truth what we feel in the moment or how we objectively (or not) consider it afterwards?