Why Don't You Love Me? by Paul B. Rainey Review

Claire and Mark are locked in a loveless marriage along with two kids neither like, let alone love. Claire is clinically depressed, spending her days drinking wine on the couch in her bathrobe while Mark, also depressed but whose sick leave has expired, works a job he has no idea how to do. Then cracks start appearing as they begin to look at their situation. How did they ever become a couple? Why don’t they care about their children? Why does Mark think he works in another profession? All isn’t what it seems…

I’m gonna be very careful in reviewing this one because literally halfway through the book there’s a dramatic switch and the story you thought you were reading goes in a completely unexpected direction. So Paul B. Rainey’s Why Don’t You Love Me? is really a book of two halves and, though I liked that Rainey did something ambitious like that at the midway point, the explanation for it wasn’t nearly as original and the content of the second half wasn’t as good as the first.

The first half is a slice-of-life story about dead marriages, bad parenting and depression. It’s brutal to see how awful both Claire and Mark are to their two young children and yet you also don’t hate either of them, mainly because they’re occasionally quite funny in their dark ways. I enjoy characters who are such complete bastards and these two are so over-the-top terrible parents that what they say and do is undeniably amusing.

The book is presented as a series of one-page strips with the title and author credits at the start of each page, adding to the sense that we’re reading a newspaper gag strip, though they flow together well into a clear narrative. It’s interesting that nobody actually voices the title question - why don’t you love me? - despite it being an underlying question for nearly all of the characters.

Rainey drops subtle hints throughout this first half in preparation for the revelations of the second half which kept me interested to find out what exactly was meant by them. Like why Mark keeps failing to remember his son’s name is Charley and not Tommy, or why he seems to think he’s a barber instead of the website manager that he seems to be. There’s also a catastrophic event that affects everyone around them but they choose to ignore it for some reason and, because we’re reading the story from their perspective, by extension we’re kept in the dark as to what this event was, until we find out later on, as well as to why Mark and Claire refuse to acknowledge it.

That said, their antics start to get a tad repetitive after 100 or so pages so I was glad for the gear shift. After that happens though, there isn’t much to the second half. Without going into spoilers, I wasn’t that taken with either character’s storyline and the explanation for it all was really flat and unremarkable - disappointingly so. It’s the kind of rubbish you’d expect to see Marvel or DC trot out (and they do, frequently, in all their media), it’s so hackneyed.

I enjoyed the first half of the book a lot more than the second. The humour is reminiscent of Dan Clowes’ Wilson and Simon Hanselmann’s Megg and Mogg comics, so if you enjoyed those, you’ll probably get something out of this book. I appreciated the midway point razzle-dazzle but the second half didn’t live up to the switcheroo and it’s all downhill after that. Still, Why Don’t You Love Me? is an intriguing, sometimes entertaining, and surprising indie comic that I’d say is one of the year’s comics highlights and worth checking out.