Red Eye, Black Eye
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
In the days after September 11th, with the ruins of his job, relationship, and city crumbling around him, cartoonist and roustabout K. Thor Jensen packed a backpack, bought a bus pass and took to the open road. His 60-day, 10,000-mile journey is chronicled in this ragtag romance. From riding the back of a burning couch in Birmingham, Alabama to aiding stray dogs in Butte, Montana, building a giant papier-mache vagina in Columbus, Ohio to smuggling drugs across the border in El Paso, Texas, Jensen searches for the last remnants of a meaningful life as he rides the Greyhound bus. Stopping over in eighteen cities, he interacts with a diverse cast of supporting characters, and they each recount a story of their own to him, cobbling together a modern Canterbury Tales for the slacker generation. Red Eye, Black Eye is a fractured portrait of life in 21st century America, as the protagonist and his compatriots drink, fight, stumble and fall their way through their travels. It's also riotously funny, charmingly crude and beautifully drawn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
September 2001, New York City: in the space of a few days Jensen loses his girlfriend, his apartment, his job, his grandmother and a local landmark. He decides to buy an Ameripass on Greyhound and travel around America by bus for the next two months, staying with people he knows only via the Internet, in a bid to find himself... or at least the secret of life. Instead of any such easy tropes, Jensen finds "the common man" of today an America of decent enough Gen-X and Gen-Y slackers. This graphic novel is mostly their little oddball stories a woman whose co-worker wears her aborted fetus as a necklace; a childhood quest for Bigfoot that turns up a bum; a sloppy roommate from hell. Jensen's own quest is mostly a litany of uncomfortable bus rides and the constant need for a shower. His journey is portrayed as surprisingly mundane except for a surreal stop in a Southern town whose residents amuse themselves by pulling flaming sofas behind trucks. Jensen resists all attempts at sentimentality; similarly, the rough, blocky art makes no pretense at beauty for its own sake, but gets across these sympathetic, quirky tales with brisk efficiency.
