My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies by Ed Brubaker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As the title suggests, this story's lead romanticizes drug abuse, to the point that she believes the only great art comes from those who are wasted. Said lead is a teenage girl who we know as Ellie, and whom we find in an upscale drug rehab center. She's a troublemaker and resistant to treatment, and why wouldn't she be as she believes that drugs make one a musical genius. (Most of her romanticization is directed toward rock-n-roll artists, but she also admires novelists such as William Burroughs and assorted other creative types who were generally blotto in the act of creation.)
Most of the story is a budding romance between Ellie and a young man who is a bit of a mystery but who encourages her to play along for her own good. Ultimately, however, his good influence is no match for her bad influence, and they end up running off together, hanging out in vacant vacation houses. In the latter quarter of the book, the story unfolds and we learn that the relationship isn't the product of spontaneous chemistry that we've been led to believe.
Brubaker creates an addict driven to myopic and impulsive behavior, and so the reader can readily believe how she ends up in her own sort of hell in which she has no good options, only various flavors of terrible ones. The necessary foreshadowing was done for a twist ending, but it gets a little heavy handed at one point. However, to be fair, the reveal takes place in a short space as the overall work is fairly short, and the climax and resolution are late in the work.
I'm not such an expert on artwork in comics. The art and coloring seemed good to me, but I remember thinking that Ellie looked old to be approximately 18 - but then that could have been purposeful as she's supposed to have drug years on her.
I found this to be a thought-provoking work and read it straight through. It's not preachy, but does suggest an inevitability of life going sour when one lives such a life. I'd recommend this book for those intrigued by the premise.
View all my reviews
