The Con Artists: Luke Healey

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The Con Artists’ art style is clean and legible, and the writing has many standout jokes and profound lines that linger on the mind. 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. 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. It’s worried Frank, not Giorgio, who asks this question, but almost immediately he begins to regret the offer.

A great story of friendship, or rather, nostalgia for a bygone friendship, a fantasy, you might even say. A Guardian Best Book of 2022 —'A beautifully observed masterpiece… one of my favourite graphic novels I’ve ever read. 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. The front cover and the back cover feature endorsements which suggests that T he Con Artists has some comedic or at least jokey orientation to it.If you are a vulnerable person, you hang on to that someone all the more tightly, certain that this someone will be there for you when others haven't. 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.

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. That being said, it also feels like a high wire act bound by an almost overwhelming restraint, with so many emotions bubbling below the surface, without much of a climax or release for the reader. Frank only wanted three things this year— to perform stand-up comedy, go to therapy, and to keep his house plants alive. A dull and dreary tale about a gay man getting pulled into the trauma and drama of his childhood friend, another gay man. 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?Luke Healy's playful, hilarious third graphic novel uses crisp lines and physical comedy to portray an uneasy friendship between two young men on the cusp of adulting. Given this comic is semi-autobiographical (the symbolism of the glued-on moustache is hard to avoid) we describe Frank cautiously, lest Mr Healy ever reads this review. 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.

We think instead Mr Healy has crafted a predatory character camouflaged in an otherwise wistful urban landscape. 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.

And ultimately, there is something to be said about the juxtaposition of the (more blatant) ways others deceive us and the (more subtle) ways we deceive ourselves. My favourite graphic novel of the year so far, and to be honest, it might just be among my favourite comics ever . It’s definitely an interesting exploration of fraught interpersonal relationships complicated by anxiety. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

The story is about Frank, who is trying (and failing) to make it as a stand-up comedian, a friend of Giorgio, who early on gets hit by a bus and needs support.The most enjoyable aspect of this book for me were Healy's illustrations, which were really charming. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. But I never found myself much caring about what happened to anyone - and I particularly didn't care for the higher concepts Luke Healy seemed determined to introduce. Frank is willfully antisocial yet lonely, a paradox that haunts the millennial generation, well reflected in The Con Artists.