Graphic Novel Week: Demon Vol. 1 by Jason Shiga

Welcome to Graphic Novel Week! This week, I will be posting reviews of graphic novels, specifically ones from :01, which is a favorite graphic novel publisher of mine. Here's a link to their website.

The dedication of Demon Vol. 1 by Jason Shiga should serve as a warning. In a similar style to "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," it reads, "To my wife, Alina, who begged me not to dedicate this book to her." That's when I knew I had to read this book, to find out why. And, after experiencing all that is Demon, I can honestly say that I understand. ...but that doesn't mean you shouldn't read it. It just means that Jason Shiga has managed to create a golem of a graphic novel by combining the most depraved aspects of Sin City with the general zeitgeist of the movie Super, which my husband tricked me into seeing by telling me "that guy from Gilmore girls is in it." If Demon had a narrator, it would be Stuart from Family Guy. But, if you couldn't tell something's up from the maimed takeoff of a Dilbert cartoon featured on the cover, well, I can't really help you.

When actuary Jimmy commits suicide and awakens moments later (repeatedly), he discovers that he is not just a normal guy, after all. With an axe to grind and an inability to die, Jimmy leaves hundreds of bodies in his wake. His missions? To figure out what's going on and stay free of the special intelligence team tasked with pursuing him. This sounds slightly more exciting than then 9-5 grind of the actuarial office where Jimmy has spent a large percentage (he's such a mathematical genius that he could probably say exactly what percentage) up until this point. ...but, what drove Jimmy to suicide in the first place? You'll have to check out Demon yourself to find out. You can preview Demon Vol. 1 here.

The unique thing about Demon isn't Shiga's complete lack of boundaries, or the absence of decency (though, check and check), it's the fact that, despite how shockingly gross, violent, disturbing, sexual, and morally abhorrent aspects of the story are, there's a deeper engine beneath all of that which kept me reading. (Through fingers over my eyes, but still.) Every time I threw up in my mouth a little and wanted to put the book down, something else reeled me back in. 

That something is Shiga's utter brilliance. He is logical, wickedly intelligent in the best way possible, and an abstract enough cartoonist that the disgusting things depicted within his work are worse in my mind than they are on the page. ...which is kind of the point, isn't it? Shiga has buried a boggart deep within Demon, and it is that the truly unfathomably deplorable person isn't Shiga, and it isn't Jimmy, it's the reader, because nothing is going to be as horrifying as what your mind tailors specifically to your own sensibilities. You know way better than Shiga could ever know exactly what disgusts you, and his genius is that he understands that, and doesn't even try to compete with it, but instead capitalizes on it. 

I received a copy of Demon Vol. 1 free from the publisher for the purposes of this review, which contains my honest opinions.