
Fanboy (we never learn his real name) is a fifteen-year-old loner. His only friend is Cal, who shares his love of superhero comics and intellectual conversation, but since Cal’s also an athlete, they move in different social universes. His mother has remarried “the step-fascist” and they’re having a baby, so Fanboy feels like he’s been pushed out of his family. All his dreams are tied to Schemata, the graphic novel he’s writing and drawing. He plans to show his Schemata portfolio to his hero, comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, at an upcoming con — at which point Bendis will immediately faint in awe, call his publisher, and sweep Fanboy away from small-minded South Brook forever.
The thing I loved about this book is the same thing that bugged me about it: its lack of easy solutions to the characters’ problems. On the one hand, Fanboy’s steps toward self-determination are realistically small, yet totally satisfying. On the other hand, there aren’t any explanations — easy or otherwise — for some things that really should have been explained. (His mother’s pathological insistence that he must never invite anyone over, for instance, which I kept expecting to be a big deal because it seemed so unavoidably odd.) A gun is — literally — shown in the first act that never goes off in the third. These strike me as newbie mistakes, so I look forward to reading Lyga’s next book.
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