45 Days Of CCS, #44: Luke Healy

After reading Luke Healy's Self-Esteem And The End Of The World, I thought that the book was the inevitable conclusion to the sort of books he's been doing the past several years. My immediate reaction was hoping that he was done with this direction. The book is so meta that it threatens to disappear up its own ass on multiple occasions, an effect that was not only obviously intentional, it was spelled out on the page. 

Healy reviews the entirety of his published output as part of the narrative, with a particular focus on his first long-form comic done at CCS, Of The Monstrous Pictures Of Whales, which I reviewed well over a decade ago. Healy's stand-in character (one that looks like and is named Luke Healy, of course) notes that this story was a thinly disguised, gender-swapped story about a trip taken with his brother and mother, one that had other implications as he was just coming to grips with the idea that he was gay. This was when Healy was still bothering to conceal that his stories were mostly autobiographical, a disguise that fell away in Americana (about hiking in America and coming to grips on the influence the country had on an Irishman like him) and was further perpetuated in The Con Artists (where Healy puts on a mustache as a "disguise" while alerting the reader of this).

The punchline is that Self-Esteem And The End Of The World is built on largely fictional chronological elements, while the emotional beats feel genuine. None of that is important information for a reader; I'm interested in a story, not a confession or (worse) a series of anecdotes. What is definitely consistent with recent books is that making them at least autobiographical on the surface has led him to indulge some of his worst storytelling instincts. In particular, his relentless self-negativity and overall sad-sack behavior have become less and less funny and more and more tedious. Healy is obviously well aware of this, critiquing his own self-indulgence, albeit in a self-indulgent manner. 

That self-indulgence, ironically is what turns the book around. After a bunch of self-pitying shenanigans with his twin brother and his wedding (where Healy gets humiliated live on camera), Healy keeps jumping forward in time for more self-indulgent shenanigans that veer between self-aggrandizing (and painfully unaware) and self-pitying. However, in the background, the disastrous effects of climate change start wreaking havoc in dramatic ways. Massive floods nearly lead to the death of Healy and his mom after he flees a job that he's messed up. After the death of his brother, he almost dies in a rockslide on a Greek island, thanks to ground loosened by a flood. Even later, he travels to a Hollywood that's mostly underwater in order to visit a movie set adapting one of his comics. Hilariously, Healy doesn't dwell much on these increasingly alarming events, as he never wavers from his self-centeredness (and self-loathing) until the very end: Everything changes; all told, he was lucky. More than any of that, one senses just how exhausting it is to feel that the barbs you aim at the world are really meant for yourself. Outrage is tiring. Self-loathing is hard work. Even when he was being deliberately provoked by the director to lash out in a self-righteous fury, the older Healy expresses and understands, for the first time, the pointlessness of such gestures. 

It's hard to tell the boundary between Healy the person and Healy the artist and provocateur, and it really doesn't matter. This book feels like his attempt to excise feelings that had been festering for a long time, and the ever-clever Healy stretched them over multiple, absurd setpieces that amplified his deadpan but absurd sense of humor while zeroing in on shedding this sad-sack persona. Healy's best work (like in Permanent Press) had tremendous empathy for its many and (presumably) fictional characters, something that he rarely afforded to most of his own stand-in characters. Hopefully, this signals yet another new direction for Healy, one that perhaps returns to more expressive and varied art. Especially in comparison to his earlier comics, this smoothed-out version of Healy's art felt monotonous, something that felt clear with the inclusion of his own work.