As Frank tries to care for Giorgio, who is injured in a drinking related accident, the cracks form in their platonic relationship, which shatters in a quiet yet spectacular fashion. 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.

Pretty brutal Goodreads average here for what I deem well done comics, sort of minimal, with barely tolerable main characters who are essentially conning each other in different ways. The Con Artists is a stylish character study that asks the question of who fools who once everyone is off-camera.Nonetheless, there is something entirely sad about Frank’s lacklustre tilts at the windmill of live comedy. 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. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.

The topics about mental health, and the reality of the main character's thoughts while experiencing a panic attack and other mental health issues to me were spot on. The Con Artists is a graphic novel exploring themes relating to mental illness, strained relationships, and artists using stories from their lives as part of their art. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it, but I did want a little more happening on a visual and emotionally expressive level.The spare art style suited the story well, and while this wasn't as hilarious as I was expecting, it was a good character study with some pretty funny moments. We appreciate that comedians, at least in our experience, often use comedy to master and anxieties, as a way of venting or exploring the things that trouble them in their personal lives. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.

A lot of the story made me feel uncomfortable, which isn't a bad thing in a story about a toxic relationship and dealing with mental health issues.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. The con here goes both ways, one rather obvious to whomever is not the main character, and one much subtler, revealed awkwardly in one panel. A Guardian Best Book of 2022 —'A beautifully observed masterpiece… one of my favourite graphic novels I’ve ever read. Finding himself unable to disentangle himself from his friend's complicated life, has Frank become Giorgio's unwitting accomplice? 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.

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. 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. When it comes to the portrayl of mental illness you can tell it's something the author has experience with, though I didn't love the somewhat dissmissive epilogue. Moving in with and caring for his estranged childhood friend quickly starts to chip away at Frank’s sense of self, as well as Giogio’s carefully curated online persona. He can be hilarious, and if you are even slightly tired of the current craze elsewhere in the literary world for thinly disguised autobiography (out of which, having cleverly given one of his characters a false moustache, he gently takes the piss), then I think this minor masterpiece of a book might be for you.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. Healy's pilgrimage through America is also a journey into his own mind, soundtracked by blistered footsteps and breathless huffs, and told with winning honesty.