Babak Ganjei – Hilarious Consequences (Records Records Records)
4/5
By: Tim Dellow
I’ve started this review of this exceptionally funny, vaguely depressing graphic novel by Babak Ganjei about eight times. It’s near impossible as he’s someone I know – someone for whom I have the story behind the story.
You’ll understand when you read it, it’s hard to pull your own critical punches on a human being when the book deals them out in a self-deprecating sleugh of right hooks – and purely reviewing the “art” when it’s this self-involved is impossible. As he writes himself “the most liberating thing I learnt at art school was [that art is] the needy people trying to connect”.
Watch this cartoon he made.
Now imagine this was your friend? He will be by the end of the book – the empathy is incredible for this tragic-comic character. But how would you “review” his work? Technically its humour is precise, his bathos and timing reach real levels of genuine hilarity and human truths, yet to review technically is not enough: and every level of criticism I apply to this seems to become a character assassination of a truly beautiful human being.
Just buy the book: it’ll make your life better. And also features a rather nice CD soundtrack where his friends, (Dan Michaelson, Matthew Tong [of Bloc Party], The Bronsteins, Singing Adams, Big Deal…) and his own band Wet Paint all write odes to his life of high ambition and bar jobs, love for his son and hopelessness at relationships. And depressing slugs.
Watch Babak’s band Wet Paint performing at Club Rockfeedback below:
Artists in this article: Wet Paint, Babak Ganjei
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