Tricked

I'm not a hardcore Alex Robinson fan in anyway, but I really liked his graphic novel Box Office Poison (BOP) a lot and was really glad to see that he'd made a new one - Tricked.

A lot have happened with Robinson's writing since BOP. Robinson has said in interviews that he didn't plan the story of BOP, but more wrote as he went along. That is apparent and the story is a little unfocused but it also makes it quite charming and creates a feeling of slice-of-life. Tricked, on the other is much more structured and planned.

The story is told from sex main character's perceptions- (in the order of the drawing) Ray, a former rock star, Nick, a signature forger, Phoebe, a high school girl, Steve, a computer nerd and Ray's fan, Caprice, a waitress, and Lily a secretary at Ray's record company. In the start they don't seem to have anything to do with each other as thy are very different, but in the end there stories intertwines. The different characters have different narrative styles according to the characters personality and Robinson does this very effectively. Steve, the computer nerd with very low social and emotional IQ doesn't has a problem with communication with others whereas he has a really rich inner world. Whereas Robinson in the most part of the book uses dialog, Steve's parts are almost narrated in first person voice-over.

Just as the narrative was a little unfocused in BOP, so where the drawings. The drawings in Tricked are much more tight and Robinson seems to have refined his style. The style is much more unified and the level of details more defined. The narration and the drawings are integrated and it works as a unity rather than illustration to the text which tends to be the case in many graphic novels (Fun Home for ex.). Robinson has further created his own language in BOP and has invented (I think) a few drawing narrative tricks that he continues to use in a better way this time around. He for example draws long cafe/pub discussions with a lot of bubbles where you can't read all the text. The bubbles hide each other and only part of the dialog is possible to see. This is a good way of representing an evening of not-that-important but never-ending discussion. This looked sometimes as a mistake in BOP, but in Tricked it looks and works great.Robinson's stories, both BOP and Tricked, are nice and easy to read, but maybe a little shallow in comparison to other graphic novelists in his genre such as Craig Thompson, Marjane Satrapi, David B and more. Tricked might be a little less charming than the more autobiographical BOP, but overall, with the improved narrative style and drawings, it is at least as good as his first novel. In the end Robinsons Tricked is a good graphic novel that uses the medium in a great way. I enjoyed it all the way through.