WIPEOUT GN - Hardcover

Francesca Ghermandi (b. 1964, Bologna, Italy) makes her home on the outskirts of Bologna, where she also pursues careers as an illustrator and painter. The Wipeout is her first graphic novel to be published in English.

Research chemist Jim Tartaglia dreams of the riches that will be his once he finishes developing his new universal cleaning solvent. His wife, Bawl, dreams of purchasing an expensive, classy hair transplant to replace the cheap wooden one she's been forced to settle for. Virgin Prunes, their brunette neighbor, has promised Jim she'll run away with him-if he helps her get rid of Chonfra, a wealthy entrepreneur who buys her affections. Ghermandi's original but stilted graphic novel tries hard for the avant-garde but unfortunately leaves the impression of a series of creative misfires. Her choice to combine text narration with the comics conventions of word balloons and thought bubbles is distracting enough; her addition of second-person narration throws the text into confusion. The bright colors and exaggerated cartoony characters (Jim is quite literally a cardboard cutout, Bawl is a sphere with stapled-on hair and Virgin looks like a lollipop posing for Penthouse) are vibrantly drawn, but they clash with the hard-boiled noir sensibility of the story Ghermandi has chosen to tell. The end result suggests less a juxtaposition of two genres than a children's book that under no circumstances should fall into the hands of children. The conflicting styles would be less jarring were the text and the art not also competing for storytelling rights. Despite the single-author credit, there is a real sense that Ghermandi the writer does not trust Ghermandi the artist to get her point across-much of the text either directly restates the action or stops the story cold with ironic commentary.
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