A Not-Very-Graphic Graphic Novel (The Yattering and Jack)

Now don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed this graphic novel. Yes, I read the graphic novel version of this story, not the just text version. The Yattering and Jack by Clive Barker is one of the few stories from this class, along with The Funeral and Breeding Ground, that I would recommend to friends to read. I found it an interesting take on a story, I found the characters interesting and well depicted, and at no point did I want to set the story down before I finished it. It was so short and funny. The artist did a beautiful job with this story, making a little demon I could see as a plushie on my bed, and Barker did a great job making a humorous little story about a demon who can't do the one thing he’s supposed to. I loved the idea that Jack was oblivious to everything, and I loved the twist at the end that he was doing that on purpose to infuriate the Yattering. I especially loved the ending, because I felt it was just the Yattering basically becoming Jack's pet in place of all the cats that he killed.

That being said, despite being a very entertaining train wreck, I don't think the story did what the author intended. I don't think that came across. I feel like we as the reader are supposed to sympathize with the poor, depressed, suicidal, horny demon trapped forever in Jack’s house. I didn't actually get that though. I figure that that's what the author tried for, but the whole time I was rooting for Jack. I feel like this story is a worse version of Paradise Lost, trying to make you sympathize with the bad guy. But one of the things I loved best about this story was not sympathizing with the Yattering, but laughing at his frustration.

I think this story, much like Rawhead Rex that we read previously by Barker, benefits from the addition of visual aids, such as being a graphic novel or a movie. I got much more pleasure out of the stories reading them in the visual form then the purely text forms. Let’s be real here, nothing really happened in the story, so the visuals are what we rely on for content. The author follows the normal try and fail over and over trope, and they are not very interesting attempts. For a graphic novel, this story wasn’t very graphic with the Yattering’s attempts to drive Jack insane. You would have thought they would have put their top notch demon on the job, but this demon falls flat because the toothpaste all over the bathroom didn’t work, boo hoo. This story should have skipped right to killing cats and began there, because even for a humor with horror story, nothing about this demon was horrifying.

Read the graphic novel, not just the text. You'll thank me later.