Jeffrey Koterba

I got this book as an advanced reading copy through the Amazon Vine program. I have heard of Koterba before but wasn't very familiar with his work. I thought that a Memoir of a cartoonist would be fun to read and it was an okay read, but not fun.

Koterba tells his story of growing up in a poor and dysfunctional family with Tourettes syndrome. He finds refuge in music and drawing; and is constantly seeking approval from a father who never gives it. He shows us his path to become a full-time cartoonist.

There were some things I liked about the book and other things I didn't. Koterba does a good job of telling the story from the point of view he would have had at that age. For example when he talks about what happened when he was six, he does it from a six year old's perspective. The strange things his dad does are all he knows; so the story doesn't seek pity from the reader rather it tells the story in an unbiased way. This changes as he gets older and starts to compare his family to other families. Some of the looks into his life at various times are fascinating, and at points, this memoir is more a nostalgic journey back into the seventies than anything else.

The above being said I had a lot of trouble getting into this book. It starts out slowly. A lot of time is given to his childhood and then as he gets older the story becomes less detailed and more disjointed. To be honest some of the childhood stuff is interesting, but some of it really drags on. I was also a little disturbed that early on he spends a ton of time talking about his family, but then when he has a family of his own they are mentioned infrequently as if they are only an afterthought to the story of his career. This was confusing because you would think his children and wife would shape his life just as much as his own mother and father did. He spends so much time talking about all the clubs he played at and cartooning jobs he took, that as a reader I felt like his own family (wife and children) really didn't matter all that much. This made me kind of sad, because I had hoped he would learn something from his own experiences growing up in a dysfunctional house.

All in all this book doesn't really teach anything. The author doesn't really come to any deep realization about his life, he just states the facts and lets you draw your own conclusions. The story itself pretty much just ends in the middle of things. All in all I found it kind of a depressing read. Maybe I would be more excited about it if I was a Koterba fan or knew more about him. I was also very disappointed that despite this book being about his life as a cartoonist, none of his cartoons are in here. It would have been nice to have at least a few of his cartoons in here for people unfamiliar with his work. Especially since most of the end of the book revolves around different pieces of work that he did for magazines/newspapers.

Overall it was an okay read. Some of it is interesting, but the disjointed way the memoir is presented makes it difficult to get into at times. I was also disappointed by the lack of any of his cartoons in the book itself, this was the main reason I wanted to review the book. I probably won't be checking out any more works by Koterba.… (mais)

Jeffery Koterba is an award-winning political cartoonist. This memoir covers his childhood and some years after. It was a painful childhood. His father was a hoarder who gathered junk to sell and supplement the family income, mostly TV sets that he could repair and sell. Their house slowly became completely covered in junk. The father also had difficult moods, and it wasn't until he was an adult that Jeffrey realized both he and his father's odd twitches were symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome. Early on Jeffrey escaped into drawings, and he was a hard worker who, with agonizing slowness, worked his way up to syndication of his political cartoons in many newspapers On the way he himself married and fathered a son and became a member of a band.

Koterba writes well and his memoirs are interesting. He once again shows that creativity and genius are often allied with disorders like Tourette's or autism. It seems that too often genius must pay a price.

Good book. Recommended.

Disclaimer: I received my copy of this book for free in return for a review through the Amazon Vine program.… (mais)

Let me start off by telling you that Inklings is not a graphic novel memoir. I made the mistake of thinking it was due to something I read on an Amazon page, so don't make the same mistake. I think that disappointment might have soured my reading experience a bit.

Inklings is split up into three sections, Jeffrey's childhood, teen years, and adulthood. I could have done without 3/4 of the first section. For me the stories seemed rather repetitive in Jeffrey's childhood, almost always revolving around his father's antics. I really disliked his father until the last section of the book when he had mellowed out with age. He was just not easy to read about.

The book really gets going for me towards the end of the second section when Jeffrey is in college and his cartooning starts to become very important in his life. Don't get me wrong, from the very beginning we see Jeffrey drawing cartoons. But when he starts to pursue it professionally the book really takes off. I wish Jeffrey's cartooning was a larger focus in the book. I loved seeing him reach his dream, being a cartoonist at the newspaper he's read since he was a child. (Not a spoiler, it's in his bio!) It just felt really good to see him get something he worked so so hard for. I also liked reading about his family in the last part of the book. When they had all grown up and their parents had mellowed with age. They just all got along so much better.

Overall a slow start but with a satisfying ending.… (mais)