The Con Artists: Luke Healey

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The central question that animates ‘The Con Artists’ is: what does it mean to watch someone struggle? It wants to be twisty, but its just a typical take on the stick in the mud being yanked out and waved about by a person with mysterious motives, dubious schemes, and/or mental health issues.

Giorgio is a nightmare patient, as demanding as a hotel guest, for all that it’s in his house that they’re staying.

com/books/2022/may/23/the-con-artists-by-luke-healy-review-a-beautifully-observed-masterpiece and Drawn and Quarterly https://drawnandquarterly. It isn’t hard at all to imagine such frenemies as the stars of some future film or TV series, though personally I would be quite content if Healy would only give them another outing between hard covers. A great story of friendship, or rather, nostalgia for a bygone friendship, a fantasy, you might even say. The Con Artists’ art style is clean and legible, and the writing has many standout jokes and profound lines that linger on the mind.

It’s worried Frank, not Giorgio, who asks this question, but almost immediately he begins to regret the offer. The story is about Frank, who is trying (and failing) to make it as a stand-up comedian, a friend of Giorgio, who early on gets hit by a bus and needs support. Frank only wanted three things this year— to perform stand-up comedy, go to therapy, and to keep his house plants alive. It almost reads like a parable, just the exploration of a friend helping another friend and uncovering things he didn't know about them. What might have initially been funny on a first read becomes poignant in its failed earnestness, and then depressing and disturbing when the lines are repeated before various audiences throughout the course of the comic.I just could not care why the dweeb kept hanging around with the asshole or what they'd get up to next. Healy opens this with a section declaring this as TOTALLY FICTION, NOTHING to do with ME and then interrupts the story half way to take a break and reassert that this is TOTALLY fiction, so that is funny.

The simple art style really helps to ground what could easily otherwise become a pretty heavy story. Finding himself unable to break free from his friend’s complicated life, has Frank become Giorgio’s unwitting accomplice? This is a much quieter, introspective story than a lot of Healy’s previous work, but it definitely has emotional layers that encourage further reflection after reading. But it’s a tender, intimate story, too, one in which long-repressed love and competitiveness bubble up as if from nowhere. It is as if he knows deep in his heart that this is not his forte (he ducks out of the Edinburgh Comedy Festival on no good excuse), but he continues to slog away at his craft before strangers, a ritual of half-hearted immolation.Luke Healy's declaration in the beginning and the interruption later are thought-provoking and funny. It’s definitely an interesting exploration of fraught interpersonal relationships complicated by anxiety.