BORB

Here's a one-page article I once wrote on Jason Little's excellent graphic novel called Borb, that came out in 2015. I made this for a very cool fanzine project that was asking every participant for a single A4-sheet of whatever they were inclined to write about, then putting all these mini single-sided zines together and xeroxing/sending all of them to everyone that had put some effort into it. I forgot who were compiling this and the name of the project (I blame Instagram and short attention span), but I definitely remember how it felt to receive all these great mini zines in the mail! The rest were more HC oriented (with admittedly more work involved than my one-page single review haha.)
​I should definitely try to get a similar thing going one of these days...

"BORB is a comic book written and drawn by Jason Little, who you may know from his work on Shutterbug Follies (winner of two Ignatz Awards at Small Press Expo). It's a short, almost dialogue-free, 96-page book drawn in the style of old depression-era comics strips like Little Orphan Annie or Frank King's Gasoline Ailey. Uncivilized Books, Jason Little's publisher, describes Borb in those somewhat dispassionate words: "It is the story of a severely alcoholic homeless man, a downtrodden urban Candide whose misfortunes pile up at an alarming rate."

WHAT Borb truly is is a horrifying descent into present-day urban reality, of the kind that we usually tend to avoid: the foul-smelling homeless dude in the subway that crawls towards us, and that, upon detection, we (I mean 'we' in the most general sense; 'we' as members of a supposedly advanced civillzation) casually averts our eyes, lest this purulent, walking shadow of a man dare approach us...

THE genius in Jason Little's approach to this horror story lay justly in its graphic style. By giving Borb (the book) a false sense of'normalcy' -Hey!this is just a comic strip you know, kids stuff, right? -, Jason Little gives Borb the character more depth and verisimilitude than if he'd chosen a realistic approach, making the character's journey a poignant, gut-wrenching story.

Content warning: this book pulls no punches and may irremediably challenge your views on homelessness."