I haven’t done one of these in a while but I felt like I needed to because nobody’s calling this crap out on the book’s listing and I’m not going to waste my time reading the rest of this garbage to give it a “proper” review!
So this is a review of a Did Not Finish book: Posy Simmonds’ latest, Cassandra Darke. And, like many of you who find themselves suffering through some bad reading, I checked out the reviews to see if there was someone out there who understood my pain, but I didn’t see anything that came close to mirroring my experience of this drek. So I thought, let me be the catharsis for anyone foolhardy like me who attempted this rubbish - you are not alone!
How far did I make it? Page 34 out of 94. Now, I’ve stuck out comics as bad as this for longer but I especially found this soul-sucking as it really is a Graphic Novel. That is, blocks of dreary prose alongside plain pictures with only the occasional panel looking like a recognisable comic. I can’t stand this style - it needs to go away and die a slow, painful death many decades ago.
At nearly the halfway mark there’s no discernible story to be had. The title character is a grumpy old cow art dealer who got stung for most of her fortune after she ripped off some patrons. Her ex’s pretentious, entitled twentysomething daughter is hanging about in her downstairs flat. Yes, that is all! Just a horrible cast of cunts for company and I couldn’t do it. Not that I need the characters in a story to be likeable, but, in lieu of a story, they have to be entertaining and they really aren’t in Cassandra Darke.
This is the kind of comic that tossers who only read Ian McEwan novels and The Guardian pick up to make them feel cosmopolitan - “ooo, how broad-minded of me, a bourgie intellectual, slumming it by reading a Graphic Novel, honk honk fart!” The current state of British comics is Darke indeed.
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