Flakey Victory

Two rather gentle seaside-adjacent recent graphic novels for you today, Matthew Dooley Flake and Owen D. Pomery Victory Point.

Both books use their specific locations to impart a strong character of their own to each tale, both are rather beautifully and distinctively drawn, as are their characters. Both books feature protagonists who are in a rut, searching for something else, seeking to define themselves against their respective pasts and position themselves in an uncertain future. Both have a happy ending and I found both very affecting.

In Flake we meet Howard an ice-cream seller of little ambition in Dobbiston, a fully realised northern town where nothing ever happens. We follow Howard through the tribulations of dealing with his aggressive ice-cream nemesis, and half-brother, Tony. As the back cover states, it is a story of friendship and fighting back, as well as fate.

You grow to love and root for Howard and his friends Alex and Jasper. Flake is replete with good humour and love, plus some really groovy lollipop and ice-cream van designs. Dooley’s illustrations are simple and rather gloriously full at the same time, his tonal palette almost always subdued and suggestive of ice-cream.

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Victory Point is a much slimmer, more cerebral, pared down volume. We meet Ellen as she returns to the titular town she grew up in, walks about a bit and ponders her life, past present and future. The star of the book is the town Victory Point itself, an architectural and social experiment brilliantly rendered by Pomery, in a wonderfully spare, yet detailed style. I found myself yearning to visit, unlike Dobbiston and very caught up in Ellen’s life. It is a deceptively simple book and whilst it was a quick read, I have read it twice since it arrived on Saturday and dreamed about it once too.

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Buy them both.

1089 Down (by the seashore).