My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, by David Heatley

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My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, by David Heatley

POSTED: Monday, October 20, 2008, 6:59 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

Pantheon, 128 pp., Sept. 30

Along with the prose memoir, the autobiographical graphic novel has seen a surge in popularity in recent years. It seems as though every illustrator with a compelling life story to tell wants to follow in the footsteps of landmarks like Persepolis and Maus, and share all their deep inner drama with us readers. However, it takes a few key factors to pull this off. First, the author’s life has to be interesting enough to capture our attention; no one wants to read a biography of some random schmuck down the block. Second, it can’t be so foreign from our experience that we can’t relate to the themes in the work. And finally, the art has to be engaging and unique, to separate the work from the wealth of crap out there.

This brings us to David Heatley’s debut effort, My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down. Now, David Heatley has been at this trade for a while, gracing issues of McSweeney’s and Mome with his work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up nearly as well in long form, which is probably why Brain is broken into several subsections, which are broken into several more, which sometimes get reduced to individual panels that serve as vignettes of the episodes in his life. The five main sections are titled “Sex,” “Race,” “Mom,” “Dad” and “Kin,” each one featuring a collection of dreams and anecdotes on each subject. But I just find it really difficult to care that much about most of his stories. The “Race” chapter takes up nearly half the volume, and is essentially a listing of every single black person Heatley has ever known. (I’m still not entirely sure what the point of doing that is.)

The art, meanwhile, is occasionally charming, but offset by the author’s attempt to be “mature” with the graphic sex and violence peppering the sketchbook atmosphere of the work. One of the first pages features a sex dream where Heatley and his wife are buying female genitalia in a deli, which pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the book. It’s an interesting attempt, but ultimately one that falls flat with the choppiness of the narrative (if you can even call it that). I’m tempted to think he ripped all the pages out of his journal, threw them back together in a random order, and illustrated them in the most subversive, cartoony way possible.

Again, this is a first attempt, and Heatley is capable of some truly memorable moments. But as it stands, his work is more effective in bite-size pieces, and hopefully he can figure out how to make his longer work have the same staying power with his audience. Probably he should set his brain right side up for that.

A meta Brain panel from amazon.com is hanging after the jump.

amazon.com

Posted by Greg Niedt @ 6:59 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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