THE COMPLETE BOX OFFICE POISON, by Alex Robinson

Worth the Weight?

I had heard a lot about Box Office Poison through my years of hanging out at comix shops, poking around comix sites on the web, reading comix publications, etc., etc. Every time I thought about picking it up, I found myself turned off by the title. The few ads I had seen had also turned me off--sadly, in the field of graphic literature, you are not entirely wrong in judging things by how they look--and everything about Box Office Poison seemed to suggest a cartoonist with a shaky line detailing life as he knew it with a cast of relatively bland characters.

But when Top Shelf announced that it was releasing the entire series as a 600 page graphic novel, I reconsidered. Top Shelf is one of the best publishers of indy comix today, and I find myself pretty closely aligned to their tastes. If it was worth the substantial commitment for them to publish a 600 page graphic novel for thirty bucks (an extraordinarily good price) then I'd check it out.

Box Office Poison follows six adults (with a well-developed cast of supporting characters) as they live their lives, love their loves, and, most importantly, measure to what and whom they should remain faithful. The centerpoint of the story is ostensibly Sherman Davies, a struggling writer and embittered book store clerk who gets involved fellow writer Dorothy Lestrade, who previously roomed with Jane and Stephen, Sherm's current roommates. Jane and Stephen have to balance their bad experiences with Jane against their desire not to interfere with Sherm's life. As the book develops, it is Sherm's pal Ed who has the most to deal with as he tries to lose his virginity, break into the comix industry, and seek redress for his boss, Irving Flavor, who created the popular superhero Nightstalker and who signed away all his rights to the character years ago. By the end of the book, characters have to live with the choices they have made, and it's a mark of Robinson's sophistication that some of the characters who chose loyalty are not necessarily rewarded and those who betray others are not necessarily punished. It's how deserving the things are that we swear allegiance to, Robinson seems to suggest, that make the difference in how things turn out.

I tore into this book and, at the halfway mark, found myself deeply in love with the characters and the cartoonist's storytelling. Robinson has a decent way with body language and, usually, the thicker his line and the more black on the page, the more appealing to my eye. Robinson also has a clever way with somatype--Stephen has a face that is all angles and the rounded body of the out-of-shape academic, while Jane has a rounded face with a skinny body and Robinson seems to delight in showing them naked frequently. But my love affair with the book ended before the book itself actually did, and I looked at my experience with Box Office Poison the way one might remember a vacation that had been great except for the last two days when one got sun poisoning--a fond smile that threatens to twist into a slight grimace.

Part of this may just be that much of BOP's ground is covered in Dylan Horrocks' excellent Hicksville. Horrocks has a similarly cartoony style (albeit a more judicious application of blacks) and also studies affairs of the heart contrasted to the comic industry's betrayal of artistic dreams and aspirations. At less than half the length (although weight-wise, it feels about a sixth of BOP), Horrocks' work feels more expansive, in part because I found his work more poetic and more elusive; his scenes of emotional conflict are also more elliptical than Robinson's.

Interestingly, for me, I'm perfectly comfortable with the less elliptical--the simple cathartic joys of melodrama are not automatically referred to backseat status as they frequently are by literary critics. A gathering that occurs at a skating rink that erupts into a screaming match midway through BOP, for example, is perfectly satisfying, and many of the joys in Robinson's narrative come either in such honest and messily large moments, as well as the various digressions from the narrative (the page cataloguing the types of annoying questions one gets working in a bookstore is dead-on and hilarious). But after the showdown at the comic convention, Robinson changes up his narrative so that it ends quickly and largely elliptically. An entire "Whatever happened to..." chapter as presented by a character looking back from middle-age on the end of the story, in short, about which I felt pangs of satisfaction in a sea of dissatisfaction.

I'd be a liar if I didn't say that this happens a lot in graphic literature--the area of comix is rife with creators overshooting the mark as their creative powers mature during the course of the many years invested in the work and they find themselves with an entirely different sensibility than what they started with, or with what the work requires to remain of a piece. But in Box-Office Poison, it seemed to particularly rankle as I found myself with a handful of scenes alluded to that I genuinely wanted to see. And this is the problem, for the writer and artist, with melodrama--you have to feed the beast. Robinson's book is filled with many simple pleasures--good solid eating--but it didn't feed the beast. And some of the accomplishment of Robinson's story lies in not being as obvious as you think it's going to, which is damning it with faint praise but necessarily so. Alex Robinson's skills grow considerably through the course of the Complete Box Office Poison--my hope is that his next story will be able to blend the simple and the sophisticated in a way I'll find more thoroughly satisfying. As for Box Office Poison, even with all these caveats, I recommend that you check it out--getting lost in a book for hours on end is a wonderful feeling. Just watch out for the sun poisoning.

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