Blog Archives
Davis, Eleanor – The Hard Tomorrow
I really have to fix this shanty town of a website. Thought I’d check to see exactly how long I’ve been reviewing Eleanor’s comics, but unfortunately it just lists the date and not the year. And that’s not even getting into when I lost a bunch of review dates with a site rebuild. Holy crap do you have no interest in any of that, so how about we talk about maybe Eleanor’s best book yet? My guess is since roughly 2004 for the reviews, by the way. One thing a book, movie, show, whatever needs to be engaging, at least for me, is to have characters that come to life even off the page/screen. Sure, it’s not going anywhere if they’re boring on the page, but to have something really feel lived in, I need to be wondering what these characters are doing when they’re not the focus. Everybody has seen shows where it looks like characters are just waiting for the scene to start, and you can’t picture any of them engaging in small talk. I had questions about damned near everybody in this, and that’s a hard feat to pull off. What’s it about, you ask, several sentences into perhaps even more rambling than usual? It’s the story of Hannah and Johnny, a couple who’s living off the grid, trying to make a baby while fighting back against the ways that the world is turning awful however they can. There’s also Hannah’s job and her best friend Gabby, Johnny’s paranoid friend, the marches, and the one good cop in the world (which comes back into play later). Hannah’s getting a lot of grief from her friends about trying to have a baby with the world the way it is, which coincides with Eleanor having a recent baby of her own. It’s a good question, and it’s something I struggle with. But I have the luxury of struggling hypothetically, which she does not. There are so many good scenes here, but I’m not going to spoil any more of them. If you’re even mildly liberal and wonder why we fight against the relentlessly terrible news these days, this book will speak directly to you. Like I said, I think it might be her best, so obviously you’d be cuckoo bananas not to get it. $24.95
