Backflash
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Overwhelmed with grief over the death of his mother, shamed by his failures in marriage and fatherhood, and burdened by massive debt, Devin’s life is spiraling out of control.
That is, until he discovers the impossible: nostalgia is his superpower.
With a random touch of family memorabilia, he can mentally travel back in time, reliving the best moments of his past while finding relief from the present.
With his mother gone, Devin can now investigate her greatest secret: the identity of the father he never knew. But the more Devin "backflashes" into time, the faster his present life falls apart. On this hunt for a truth that was never supposed to come to light, Devin must come to terms with his past if he wants any chance at a future.
By Mat Johnson, the author of Pym, Loving Day, and Incognegro, Backflash is a riveting literary graphic novel thriller laced with sly humor and raw emotion that explores time travel in wild and un-predictable ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A grief-stricken son discovers he can revisit his past in this wry graphic novel from American Book Award winner Johnson (Incognegro). Johnson sets a mordant tone early on—protagonist Devin tries to drop a rose into his recently deceased mother's grave but instead falls onto her coffin ("My mother is dead. And I'm sitting on her"). A jobless washout lacking purpose now that his role as caregiver is finished, Devin hides in nostalgia rather than dealing with selling the family house. He's rattled, though, when an especially vivid childhood memory seems to transport him back to his late-1970s youth. Through internet sleuthing he discovers an underground community of people who "backflash." Devin strikes up an unusual bond with Marcos, a bodybuilder who trains him to use physical items with strong nostalgic associations to trigger backflashes. Though Devin simply hopes to mend his heartbreak, bringing adult perception to events he did not fully understand as a child has unexpected consequences—among them, that he picks up clues to track down his deadbeat dad. Well-paced art by Lieber (Who Killed Jimmy Olsen?) emphasizes the comedic aspect of Devin's muddleheaded confusion and arrested adolescence without tipping into slapstick. The narrative ends abruptly, but Johnson raises psychological and philosophical questions that will linger in readers' minds. Comics fans who dug Memento and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind should check this out.
