How to classify any piece of media that you couldn’t finish? Sometimes things are genuinely bad, like, opening a chicken sandwich only to find a serving of cat litter instead of chicken. However most often, the case is that the thing in question just didn’t gel with you, the consumer, or it wasn’t intended for you. I think I’d put Rusty Brown in the latter category. It isn’t bad, I just don’t think it was for me. Rusty Brown is a melancholic meditation on Small Town America and growing up a broken person around people who are, themselves, broken. It’s non-standard style of presentation, ie the panels aren’t in the typical comic layout, lends itself to a slow examination as the reader is guided to read the story thoroughly. This inevitably leads to a slower read which emulates the slowness of the daily life the characters are going through. Whilst I can appreciate the artistic intent, the story itself, I feel, was not intended for me. The one phrase I can think of when reading this comic was “hopeless”. You see several of the characters go through their lives, through flashbacks and flashforwards, showing the true hopelessness that consumes them throughout. Nobody lives a good or easy life in this book, naturally conflict often drives a story, but some flickers of hope would have made reading this book less of a slog. But the reason I say that this book wasn’t for me, is that there will be people out there who will enjoy Rusty Brown. Whilst I may not be one of them, that doesn’t detract from the fact that this is a well thought-out and constructed comic. #bookstagram #comic #rustybrown https://www.instagram.com/p/CgkqAZ1Mpy5/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
