Well, this was misleading. It wasn't bad, I should emphasise. I enjoyed this. But it isn't at all what I expected it to be going in. It appears to be a graphic novel, based on the panel on the front cover and the traditional set of them on the back, neatly explaining in meta-fashion what the book will attempt to deliver. However, it isn't, not really, because the book itself doesn't use the approach at all. It's mostly laid out in panels, but with narration and dialogue underneath them like an old fashioned annual. Occasionally it shifts the panels from top to left and text from bottom to right, but nobody ever uses a speech bubble.

Frankly, I don't care. So it has a different presentation to the vast majority of graphic novels? I'm not going to see that as a bad thing, just a surprisingly unexpected one given what's on the cover. However, the cover also suggests that this will be a genre comic and it isn't that either. The main character isn't the woman at the back in her superhero spandex and dinky antennae; it's the one facepalming at her entrance with a bottle in her hand on the bar at the front. She's Anne Merkel and I'm very fond of her but she lives in general fiction rather than anything remotely considered genre.

We first meet her at a Mexican restaurant in New York in conversation with her friend Ricky. He's happy to call her young, talented and pretty and I'm not going to argue about that. She writes a column for 'Daddy-O' magazine, a hip New York publication and she's the only writer on the staff who ever gets fan mail. Her big glasses, not visible on the cover art, work for her big eyes as well and most of the early panels are close-ups, either of her or Ricky or both of them. However, she'll happily argue. She thinks she's fat and she knows she's good even though she doesn't put in much effort to maintain that.

For a start, she has a book deal with Hammerhey Press, based on the success of her column, but it isn't written. In fact, she still hasn't the faintest idea what to write about and she's past deadline. She's a whole bundle of self-pity and self-doubt. Then again, she idolises people who burned bright but ended horribly; they aren't good role models. And so she gets accidentally drunk as a skunk at home before her sister shows up. That's unexpected but timely. Anne wakes up in hospital with an acute case of alcohol poisoning.

Then again, Laura got shot. People are after her. And she needs somewhere to stay. She also gets changed into that superhero outfit because she's the Queen of the Leather Astro-Girls of Saturn. Yeah, that caught my attention too. It's why Anne hates Saturn, as per the title, and it's a heck of a character to throw at us four chapters into a graphic novel that may not be huge but still runs a cool twenty-three of them. They aren't long chapters. One of them's only a page long, though it's still a page that covers a lot of ground.

If I have a problem with this, it's that Kyle Baker simply refuses to deliver on that promise. This is not a book about the Leather Astro-Girls of Saturn, whoever they might be. We never meet them, beyond Laura, who's their queen. I have questions, lots of questions. He isn't interested in giving any answers, whatsoever. Laura isn't a major supporting player, not really, even if she does get an impressive moment with a rocket launcher. She's mostly the MacGuffin. Anne doesn't just Saturn just because she's not the queen of the Leather Astro-Girls but because her life gets ruined by an asshole ex-boyfriend of Laura's who wants to know where she is.

Well, there are other reasons, one of which is that Anne's Frank turns out to be Laura's Bob, which is a big deal, but it isn't really because what makes this graphic novel work isn't its plot or, for the most part, its characters; Anne notably excepted. It's the observational humour. When we meet Anne and Ricky in that Mexican restaurant, they talk. They do that a lot, wherever they might be at any point in time, and there's good observational humour in every one of those scenes. It isn't only them either. Anne does that on her own. I'm hardly the target audience for 'Daddy-O', but I'd absolutely read any column she writes, just for her writing not the subject matter. What do I care about New York City club life?

Part of it is that Anne is clearly neurodivergent, even though that word never shows up. Most of it springs from her finding weird niches in life that generate weird conflicts. There's an ongoing gag about her not having ID, which only grows as the situational comedy builds. Even five chapters in, there's a whole sequence about her getting paid in cash because she doesn't have a bank account, she can't get a bank account without having ID and she can't get ID without having ID. So she goes to the bar, where they want ID. It's almost Kafka-esque how she exists in a Catch-22 loop.

Later, in California, she can't buy alcohol in a grocery store without ID to prove she's over twenty-one, but the eighteen-year-old clerk invites her to a party because there'll be lots of alcohol. Also in California, she finds she can't cash a traveller's cheque without ID. Yet the check cashing place will happily sell her an ID of their own so that she can present it as the ID they need to cash those cheques. It cost her three bucks to get a hundred-dollar cheque, another ten to cash it, along with five more for the check cashing ID. She got eighty two bucks out of that hundred. She should have just brought a hundred in bills.

Some of it doesn't even involve Anne at all. That friend, Ricky, ends up with a column at 'Daddy-O' too. It's a black-centric column, not because he's black but for his outside perspective. Apparently, he's educated and speaks articulately, meaning that, from the point of view of readers of a black column, they won't perceive him as black. When Laura's a part of the active story, instead of only prompting its direction by not being a part of it, the way she affects everybody else is wonderful. Well, not for them, which is why Anne kicks her out, but for us, reading in the cheap seats.

As I said at the beginning of this review, I enjoyed this. It's a fun read all the way through and it's occasionally a brilliant one. There's a particular page that's dedicated to a single panel, with the text following the winding route of a bus that's supposedly taking her to Redlands but instead is seemingly lost within a maze of turns. It's hardly a complex technical achievement but it's built on pristine imagination and it fits into the sense of humour this book has like a glove. It's also neatly representative of the book as a whole because this really isn't about a beginning or an end. It's a story about the journey in-between. ~~ Hal C F Astell