I’ll have more to say about this soon–now I feel guilty for only being spurred to read it recently.
I want to say this much about the book and why I think it was cancelled. It’s a very, very well done comic–the art is excellent, the writing is excellent, and the characters are compelling even when they’re being completely, horrendously awful to each other.
But it’s a very dark book–it leaves me feeling almost dirty in a way even Scalped and Northlanders, with their regular horrors, don’t. At first you think that it’s going to be a wild, fun ride–the mixtapes, the craziness–but soon you realize that there’s something far stranger going on beneath the surface, and within the shifting characters and plots only one thing is certain: none of these people are very likable, and something really twisted is going on underneath it all.
The book is meaner than the other two I’ve mentioned. Sure, people do awful things to each other in most Vertigo books, but this one seems to laugh at them when horrible things are happening. I wouldn’t want to keep reading if I didn’t think that this itself was a commentary on society, on what goes on in the book and on us all.
I have a pretty twisted sense of humor and it takes a lot to unnerve me. I love Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis and giggle mercilessly at things that my friends are shocked by. Yet I don’t like shock value for shock value’s sake, or gross-out for gross-out’s sake. I have little use, for instance, for Wanted. So the fact that Young Liars both gives me the creeps and compels me to keep reading, makes me want to run for the showers and makes me very sad that it’s canceled, is an impressive feat.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
I need to grab the trades. From what the Funny Book Babylon folks said in their second talk about Young Liars, it took some time for the book to start revealing what it really was.
April 18th, 2009 at 5:11 am
I dropped it at issue two because I couldn’t tell where it was going and wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the money to find out. I feel guilty about that now, because it was definitely smart which I find kind of rare in a lot of Vertigo, which often strikes me as shock for shock’s sake. Vertigo titles do get canceled pretty reliably though. It’s often more shocking when titles can continue. I wish, though, that they would have let it go on a little longer and tried to get some more marketing momentum behind it before giving it the axe.
April 18th, 2009 at 9:31 am
I think this book asked too much of it’s readers. That is why it was so amazing, creative and original. Lapham can tell stories that resonate deeply and really tear at your heart strings. He did this in Stray Bullets greatly. In Young Liars he also did this, (#10 anyone) at the same time told a complex, surreal, insane story worthy of GM’s Doom Patrol. The combination was unbelievable.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
One of my favourite books of the last few years. Such a shame it got cancelled. I urge everyone who hasn’t read it to go pick up the first trade, which I’m sure I can convince you to read by naming just three of the events which happen to the main cast:
Castration. Decapitation. Spanish midget assassin.
Go read, and then be sad because it’s cancelled.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Sarah, will you marry me?
No, seriously–very well-said.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Start getting used to it, gang. This is the future of comics, and of bookselling in general. Survival of the fittest and all that. In your description of the series, you note that it made you feel sort of ashamed and dirty for reading it. Not necessarily a recipe for success in bookstore sales, if you think about it.
Vertigo is DC’s bookstore unit. FABLES, Y, HELLBLAZER, 100 BULLETS, etc. all survive because they will be traded and sold in the bookstores. In most cases, that is where most of their sales come from these days. 100 BULLETS would have been canceled years ago if it wasn’t for this factor, let alone HELLBLAZER. That’s what Vertigo is looking for in a series like this – future shelf life. I hate to say it, but YOUNG LIARS didn’t have it.
Lapham’s work is an acquired taste. His artwork is serviceable for his scripts, but not exceptional. His writing tends to be rather hard on his characters. In his crime stories, the events tend to overshadow the characters, and the impact of the story is felt in the moments where the characters break through that situation. It works for a crime story. With YOUNG LIARS, the book just never reached that point for me. I kept waiting for some of the same grab that I got from his crime work, but instead, was left with comics that lost my interest quickly. I didn’t like or care what happened to these people.
I’m guessing that DC realized that as well, and pulled the plug. Sorry. Just another opinion.