Reviews of The Three Rooms In Valerie's Head
Quotes.....
"Ingenious... Valerie’s poignant romances open larger vistas where music and imagination offer wit and insight beyond the grayness of daily life." — Library Journal
"…snortingly funny with a robust and off-kilter imagination..these short tales almost always act like riddles, sending the reader back to the beginning to figure out what makes the characters behave that way. Lightly balanced between writer and artist, each the right amount of crazy." - Etelka Lehoczky for NPR books
"Enthrallingly weird... [its] grounding core gives this off-kilter graphic novel welcome emotional depth." — Booklist
"Berry’s a master cartoonist, adept at conveying movement, and physical expression. It's poetic, mischievous, packed with wit and artistry, and you’ll want to re-read it – possibly as soon as you’ve finished." - Slings and Arrows
Funny, poignant, surreal and still warmly emotional and human — a delight to read." — Forbidden Planet
"Funny and weird... Valerie exhumes her love life by hanging out with all of the guys that didn’t work out, and the one that might still." — Barnes & Noble, Best Comics of February 2018
“Exquisitely structured for maximum satisfaction and laugh-out-loud comedy… Dan Berry’s cartooning is delicious.” — Page 45
"strangely funny, and intensely quirky….dealing with issues of loneliness and isolation, relationships, and memory, it all builds up to something that synthesizes art and ideas, telling of a life in one woman’s head, seemingly trapped in the mistakes of the past." Comicon
"A darkly beautiful meditation on obsession & memory" _ Richard Bruton
"deep and funny, this is a universal comic that so many people will enjoy." _ Geeks Worldwide
Full reviews......
Library Journal
In surreal visual metaphors that make narrative if not literal sense, Valerie creates scenarios about failed relationships and imagines conversations with ex-boyfriends in this ingenious debut from British fiction writer Gaffney (Sawn-Off Tales). For example, Valerie keeps her past flames in the basement, dragging them as zombies upstairs to her front room for socializing. Between times, she plays the melodeon and dates new men with odd social quirks. But then she meets Stanley, and they fall in love. Gaffney’s characters explore cockeyed yet beguiling ideas. Valerie imagines her melodeon’s squeals come from unhappy elves living inside the instrument and conjectures that the “frisson of recent sexual activity” might help sell a house. One of the boyfriends identifies the origin of a tarmac floor by licking it. Berry’s (24 by 7) simple watercolor art suggests that of Lucy Knisley but is rounder and more humorous and uses a colorful crayon style for flashbacks.
VERDICT Blurring the boundaries between physical and mental realities, Valerie’s poignant romances open larger vistas where music and imagination offer wit and insight beyond the grayness of daily life. This will appeal to romance fans seeking more challenging fare.—MC
Graham Johnstone, for Slings and Arrows, March 2018
Valerie is a single woman and melodeon virtuoso – “the region’s leading player of bellows-based keyboard instruments, according to the Lancashire Post”. She also, as the title says, has three rooms in her head, and we’re introduced to these in a charming cutaway drawing. The front room is where she mainly lives; the back room is where she consigns anything she doesn’t want to think about; and the basement is where she keeps her exes, as memories, or undead remains, or whatever. Sometimes she brings them up to the front room, and arranges them into scenes: a dispute around a pool table, or a trad jazz quartet. Sometimes she makes them speak, and on other occasions, they speak for themselves – perhaps voicing her own repressed doubts and fears. They tell her no one will ever love her, and question her ability to ‘chit-chat’.
The relationships and their ingeniously peculiar obstacles are told in flashbacks. Valerie and Jake are obsessed with quantifying their relationship, but struggle to agree when to start counting from. Brett analyses everything, including the nature of romance itself, which ends in a beautiful image of everyone in the restaurant apart from Valerie, staring at him (pictured). Daniel will only have sex with her in empty houses neither of them own. Gus, while working at Photoquick, develops a fetish for blurred nudes, and so on. Valerie’s hardly without difficult quirks herself. Her method of identifying the perfect ‘catch’ merges the metaphorical and literal. She throws suitors a breakable object (ideally belonging to someone else) to to see how they react.
In addition to their relationships with Valerie, the exes provide their own quirky stories within the story. Jake works for an Estate Agent, tasked with making properties look more appealing, but starts sneaking in magical little details. Daniel’s apartment is a great find, apart from the giant neon question mark outside his window. Gus works at Cleckheaton Accordion Shop and commissions from her an instructional video about the melodeon. He should be perfect for Valerie, but sees in her video a deep strangeness that she is blind to. On reading in the author bio that David Gaffney is known for his ‘flash fiction’, (or “short short stories”), it makes sense – what we have here is a collection of witty, poetic, mischievous, flash fictions woven together with the device of Valerie’s exes. The weaving together is pretty artful, and results in an incremental portrait of Valerie.
Dan Berry’s art has an expressive, yet surely hard-earned look. As we become acclimatised to the precision of computer art, it’s refreshing to see lines that look created by historic technology and the human hand – it’s like a Sunday drive to a village tea room. Berry’s a master cartoonist, adept at conveying movement, and physical expression. There’s a great example over several pages, as Gus struggles with telling Valerie what’s wrong with her video. Behind Berry’s cartoonist hand is a fine artist’s eye – there’s something of Saul Steinberg in his sense of composition and treatment of the built environment (pictured, lower). He’s also able to adapt his style and palette where the story requires it.
There’s really little to find fault with here, except perhaps that it’s a pretty slim read for your twenty dollars. The landscape format doubles-up what’s really just sixty regular pages, and you can finish it in less time than an American sitcom. Still, it’s packed with wit and artistry, and you’ll want to re-read it – possibly as soon as you’ve finished.
Check the website here
Valerie is a single woman and melodeon virtuoso – “the region’s leading player of bellows-based keyboard instruments, according to the Lancashire Post”. She also, as the title says, has three rooms in her head, and we’re introduced to these in a charming cutaway drawing. The front room is where she mainly lives; the back room is where she consigns anything she doesn’t want to think about; and the basement is where she keeps her exes, as memories, or undead remains, or whatever. Sometimes she brings them up to the front room, and arranges them into scenes: a dispute around a pool table, or a trad jazz quartet. Sometimes she makes them speak, and on other occasions, they speak for themselves – perhaps voicing her own repressed doubts and fears. They tell her no one will ever love her, and question her ability to ‘chit-chat’.
The relationships and their ingeniously peculiar obstacles are told in flashbacks. Valerie and Jake are obsessed with quantifying their relationship, but struggle to agree when to start counting from. Brett analyses everything, including the nature of romance itself, which ends in a beautiful image of everyone in the restaurant apart from Valerie, staring at him (pictured). Daniel will only have sex with her in empty houses neither of them own. Gus, while working at Photoquick, develops a fetish for blurred nudes, and so on. Valerie’s hardly without difficult quirks herself. Her method of identifying the perfect ‘catch’ merges the metaphorical and literal. She throws suitors a breakable object (ideally belonging to someone else) to to see how they react.
In addition to their relationships with Valerie, the exes provide their own quirky stories within the story. Jake works for an Estate Agent, tasked with making properties look more appealing, but starts sneaking in magical little details. Daniel’s apartment is a great find, apart from the giant neon question mark outside his window. Gus works at Cleckheaton Accordion Shop and commissions from her an instructional video about the melodeon. He should be perfect for Valerie, but sees in her video a deep strangeness that she is blind to. On reading in the author bio that David Gaffney is known for his ‘flash fiction’, (or “short short stories”), it makes sense – what we have here is a collection of witty, poetic, mischievous, flash fictions woven together with the device of Valerie’s exes. The weaving together is pretty artful, and results in an incremental portrait of Valerie.
Dan Berry’s art has an expressive, yet surely hard-earned look. As we become acclimatised to the precision of computer art, it’s refreshing to see lines that look created by historic technology and the human hand – it’s like a Sunday drive to a village tea room. Berry’s a master cartoonist, adept at conveying movement, and physical expression. There’s a great example over several pages, as Gus struggles with telling Valerie what’s wrong with her video. Behind Berry’s cartoonist hand is a fine artist’s eye – there’s something of Saul Steinberg in his sense of composition and treatment of the built environment (pictured, lower). He’s also able to adapt his style and palette where the story requires it.
There’s really little to find fault with here, except perhaps that it’s a pretty slim read for your twenty dollars. The landscape format doubles-up what’s really just sixty regular pages, and you can finish it in less time than an American sitcom. Still, it’s packed with wit and artistry, and you’ll want to re-read it – possibly as soon as you’ve finished.
Check the website here
Richard Bruton for Comicon, February 2018
This book was originally commissioned by the Lakes Comic Art Festival,one of the UK’s premier comic festivals. The performance was based on several of Gaffney’s micro-fiction works, with Berry’s art as projected imagery and accompanied by a soundtrack from recording artist Sara Lowes.
The book takes that work and creates something more, expanding, developing, creating something strangely funny, and intensely quirky. Dealing with issues of loneliness and isolation, relationships, and memory, it all builds up to something that synthesizes art and ideas, telling of a life in one woman’s head, seemingly trapped in the mistakes of the past.
It’s a wonderfully offbeat, dark comedic delight.
Valerie’s mind had three rooms;
a front, a back, and a cellar.
If there was something she didn’t want to think about at a particular moment
she would move it into the back.
Then she could concentrate on playing the accordion.
Or explaining her job to her mother.
The problem was the cellar.
Yes, the cellar. We’ll get to that in a moment.
That quote above comes from the first four pages and contains the only two panels in the entire thing that are definitely happening in the real world. Everything else in The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head is all happening inside those three rooms in Valerie’s head; front, back, and cellar. And that’s so important and so easy to forget, such is the immersive nature of the comic.
Valerie is quiet, introverted, reflective, and, you get the impression, somewhat damaged by life. But in Gaffney and Berry’s hands, exploring her inner world is often darkly hysterical. The turn of Gaffney’s phrase, the skillful use of expression and flow in Berry’s art perfectly captures both the surreal ridiculousness of it all and the sadness that underpins the tale.
Valerie’s been terribly unlucky when it comes to relationships. All of her exes have their idiosyncrasies, or perhaps they were simply completely useless. Luckily, thanks to Valerie’s rooms, she gets the chance to dredge up the past very simply…she just drags their dead bodies up to the front room and has a chat with them. You see what I mean about the way quirky veers into disturbing?
They aren’t really dead, but it suits Valerie to consider them as such, in storage down in the cellar, until she brings them upstairs.
And she would move their jaws and make them speak in scratchy voices.
Valerie was lovely, wasn’t she?
Yes, I wish I’d never left her.
We are all so stupid.
Even though they smelled and had clouded weasel eyes and spongy biceps, it was good to imagine they were dead and position their bodies into these tableaux.
The drawback was having no space in the front room for anything else.
And there it is. That’s the key. No space in the front room for anything else. Nothing.
The front room in her head is her life. The back room is where she puts things she doesn’t want to think about. Like the vase in the first couple of pages. We’ll get to that later as well. All this thinking about those exes is clogging up the front room, clogging up her head, stopping her life from moving forwards. With so little space in the front room of her life/head, there’s just no space to put anything happy and positive in there.
Having them around, always available, means she gets the chance to create the inner monologue of chatting through what they did, what went wrong, and have them give her the advice she often doesn’t want to hear.
Each old boyfriend is paraded before us, and each has their quirks. There’s Jake, an estate agent web designer with the habit of sneaking unicorns into the house pictures. He invented a prescription windscreen just so he doesn’t have to wear specs in the car. Great for him, annoys the life out of Valerie. There’s Gus, who has a secret passion for pinning blurry images of women all over his shed, and suggests to Valerie that sex would be better if he wore his mother’s old jamjar glasses to blur her up. Or Brett, the deep, deep thinker:
We are enjoying a romantic meal. But what is romance? What is a meal?
Think about the candle. Animal blubber with string for a wick. But what makes this romantic? Because it flickers? Because it masks imperfections?
That object contains no love.
A true romantic artifact is a magical talisman imbued with meaning extraneous to itself and its function.
Emotional significance is accrued to it from a couple’s joint experience of a tangible thing.
If a couple fall in love while working at a slaughterhouse the screams of terrified beasts would be romantic for them.
Cut to Valerie… in the restaurant, hers not the only aghast face in there…
Then there’s Daniel, who would only agree to sex if it was in an empty property that neither of them owned…terrified of performance. Which is why he and Valerie went to see a few empty houses for sale.
Afterwards, they lay together imagining the psychic effect on the building’s structure.
People say that an orphanage has sadness in the walls.
Well, they had injected some love into the brickwork.
This was a service they could provide professionally. Like the aroma of coffee, the frisson of recent sexual activity could be a powerful selling technique.
And Valerie made a mental note to suggest it to a property consultant.
And finally… Stanley. Oh yes, Stanley was different. Stanley’s even got his own, special room in Valerie’s head now. With hearts and candles around the door. They celebrated their first wedding anniversary in a room on the top floor of a posh hotel. It didn’t go too well.
I could tell you how it ends, so beautifully, powerfully, with a perfect moment of realization for both reader and Valerie. But that’s for you to read and enjoy for yourselves.
It’s ultimately about obsessional behavior of any form, but specifically the obsessional nature of reflection, of allowing the past to inform the present and the future in a toxic way. When you can’t go forwards without punishing yourself for mistakes of the past. What does it take to free yourself from these impediments, how can you unburden yourself and just move on?
As for Berry’s artwork, it’s always been impressive, with great use of loose lines, exceptional use of color, and a dynamic flow to his pages, all somewhat reminiscent of Quentin Blake. But here he’s experimented further, pushing his imagery more and more, taking his art to the next level. Colouring specifically for mood, even going as far as drawing left-handed in some panels to evoke a “wobbly vulnerability”. Everything combines to enhance the voices, the characters.
"I changed the art tools I was using – I used coloured chinagraph pencils for one section and for a few pages I drew with my left hand to get a wobbly vulnerability into the artwork. It was a lot of fun" Dan Berry
And his fine detail is, as always, spot on. The facial expressions are perfection. In a tale of so few words, as befits Gaffney’s work as a micro-fiction writer, Berry’s facial expressions and body language do so much.
And then there’s the vase.
It’s the masterpiece moment, and so telling, when forty pages in, we revisit the first couple of pages where Valerie moved the vase she didn’t want to think of into the back room.
In ten perfect pages, Berry performs wonders, slowing time as the vase flies through the air, with Valerie obsessively firing question after question into the ether. Panel to panel happens in microseconds, with Berry’s control exquisite. It encapsulates everything that is so good about The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head…
You can discover everything about your boyfriend by tossing a breakable object at him.
Is he poised? Confident in his judgements??
Does he seem willing to take responsibility for someone else’s actions?
Is he comfortable with spontaneity?
What is his attitude toward risk, debt, transgression, sin, guilt?
How does he experience the passage of time?
Does he appear to believe in an afterlife? An interventionist God? Ghosts, fate, predestination?
Does he demonstrate a belief that character is learned?
Is he concerned with the existential?
You learn the most if the object belongs to someone else.
Heavens, all of that, and I never mentioned the elves. Oh well, you can discover that for yourself.
Richard Bruton, Comicon
check out the website here
Barnes And Noble January 2018
The Three Rooms in Valerie’s Head, by David Gaffney and Dan Berry
Valerie has a unique way of dealing with her wildly unlucky love life: she imagines each of her old boyfriends is dead and that their bodies are stored in her basement. She’s able to bring them upstairs to talk to them about what went wrong. The story proceeds as a series of funny and weird short stories in which Valerie exhumes her love life by hanging out with all of the guys that didn’t work out, and the one that might still.
BARNES AND NOBLE JANUARY 2018
The Three Rooms in Valerie's Head is the startling outcome of a collaboration between David Gaffney and Dan Berry, an intricately organised, frequently disturbing and intermittently hilarious examination of Valerie's relationships with her ex-boyfriends. Tim Shearer, Confingo magazine
Forbidden Planet January 2018
I’ve been rather looking forward to reading Gaffney and Berry’s new book from Top Shelf, the description intrigued me when I first heard about the book, a woman who has serial problems with each relationship she attempts, and the obsessions and problems that cause each to go wrong or to fail to satisfy her standards. Relationship problems are nothing new for comics tales, of course, but here they are given an extra-fine twist: Valerie keeps her ex-boyfriends preserved bodies in her cellar, bringing them up regularly to talk to about her day or latest problems, even posing them into a sort of diorama (arguing while playing pool in the pub, performing trad jazz). And as she moves each body around and talks to it, this leads us nicely into a flashback of her time with that particular former beau.
And what a collection they are, each with some very serious defect. Well, at least, that’s how they are presented to us, but of course we are getting all of this from Valerie’s perspective. We see all the flaws in her would-be partners exposed over the course of their relationship, and wow, some of them really are hum-dingers – the boyfriend who hates wearing corrective lenses so has his car windscreen ground to his optical prescription so he can drive without glasses. Terrific. Not so good for anyone else in the car with him, like, say, Valerie, who is left nauseous by the distorted glass. And then there is the boy who is the first one she’s known who has a house with no street number! Oh dear! Or a bizarre fixation with the eyes of a former girlfriend that he has to tell Valerie about in a sequence which manages to be both disturbingly uncomfortable and yet surreal and funny at the same time.
But each of these failings and flaws (assuming they are real and not just Valerie’s imagination) slowly reveal much more about Valerie than they do her would-be boyfriends, and we see more and more of her problems surface, of the aspects of her own character, expectations and problems which sabotage any really strong relationship developing more deeply. Talking with these preserved bodies of former boyfriends may be some sort of therapy for Valerie, but it is also a crutch she is using to validate her choices (and failings) to herself, to be in control of her own narrative, but it also reveals the gaps in her life, it reveals the needs she has but either can’t connect properly with someone else to fill, or perhaps she’s a bit scared and backs off before she gets too close (and yet given her cellar collection, she clearly can’t let go either).
In some hands this would have been one of the emotional-confessional, “oh I am such an emotional mess” type tales which Indy comics has rather more than its share of (not to knock that sub-genre, I’ve enjoyed more than a few of those comics over the years). This is a very different beast, less the autobiographical confessional of some failed relationship comics tales, this is far more comedic and with a delightfully surreal bend to it so that even when there are moments which are rather sad they also manage to evoke laughter. It’s no mean feat to conjure both pity and humour from the same scenes, but Gaffney and Berry do that repeatedly throughout Three Rooms.
Dan’s art adds to that mix of surrealism, pathos and comedy enormously, his expressions on Valerie’s face as she argues with her cast of deceased boyfriends had me giggling away, but at the same time feeling sorry for her (actually Dan’s art had me roaring with laughter on a number of occasions, those expressions cracked me up). It also makes you pause and think – we all have little fantasies and daydreams, little narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves and our lives. Perhaps, thankfully, not to the surreal extreme Valerie has, but pretty much every person does have them, and that means we can all see a little of ourselves in Valerie, the hopes, the fears, the failings, the coping mechanisms; she’s not exactly a mirror to the reader, but she is perhaps a distorting reflection reminding us none of us are perfect and each of us tries some mental tricks and stories to help us deal with life’s slings and arrows, each of us could easily be Valerie.
That this is all delivered with a delightful level of humour – and a humour that steers away from meanness, it’s not laughing at Valerie’s foibles and failings – Gaffney’s script and Berry’s art working hand in glove, the dialogue and the imagery, especially during Valerie’s talks with her deceased beaus are so nicely timed together, they hit all the right beats. And I haven’t even mentioned the elves yet… Is all of this in Valeries’s imagination? I’m guessing so, the title certainly hints at it, but wisely Gaffney and Berry refrain form making it entirely clear, it’s up to the reader, and that means we have to empathise more with Valerie and her problems if we’re to come to our own conclusions, so it draws us deeper in. And it doesn’t really matter if it is in her mind or real, either way the emotional problems are real to Valerie. Funny, poignant, surreal and still warmly emotional and human, a delight to read.
Joe Gordon, Forbidden Planet
I’ve been rather looking forward to reading Gaffney and Berry’s new book from Top Shelf, the description intrigued me when I first heard about the book, a woman who has serial problems with each relationship she attempts, and the obsessions and problems that cause each to go wrong or to fail to satisfy her standards. Relationship problems are nothing new for comics tales, of course, but here they are given an extra-fine twist: Valerie keeps her ex-boyfriends preserved bodies in her cellar, bringing them up regularly to talk to about her day or latest problems, even posing them into a sort of diorama (arguing while playing pool in the pub, performing trad jazz). And as she moves each body around and talks to it, this leads us nicely into a flashback of her time with that particular former beau.
And what a collection they are, each with some very serious defect. Well, at least, that’s how they are presented to us, but of course we are getting all of this from Valerie’s perspective. We see all the flaws in her would-be partners exposed over the course of their relationship, and wow, some of them really are hum-dingers – the boyfriend who hates wearing corrective lenses so has his car windscreen ground to his optical prescription so he can drive without glasses. Terrific. Not so good for anyone else in the car with him, like, say, Valerie, who is left nauseous by the distorted glass. And then there is the boy who is the first one she’s known who has a house with no street number! Oh dear! Or a bizarre fixation with the eyes of a former girlfriend that he has to tell Valerie about in a sequence which manages to be both disturbingly uncomfortable and yet surreal and funny at the same time.
But each of these failings and flaws (assuming they are real and not just Valerie’s imagination) slowly reveal much more about Valerie than they do her would-be boyfriends, and we see more and more of her problems surface, of the aspects of her own character, expectations and problems which sabotage any really strong relationship developing more deeply. Talking with these preserved bodies of former boyfriends may be some sort of therapy for Valerie, but it is also a crutch she is using to validate her choices (and failings) to herself, to be in control of her own narrative, but it also reveals the gaps in her life, it reveals the needs she has but either can’t connect properly with someone else to fill, or perhaps she’s a bit scared and backs off before she gets too close (and yet given her cellar collection, she clearly can’t let go either).
In some hands this would have been one of the emotional-confessional, “oh I am such an emotional mess” type tales which Indy comics has rather more than its share of (not to knock that sub-genre, I’ve enjoyed more than a few of those comics over the years). This is a very different beast, less the autobiographical confessional of some failed relationship comics tales, this is far more comedic and with a delightfully surreal bend to it so that even when there are moments which are rather sad they also manage to evoke laughter. It’s no mean feat to conjure both pity and humour from the same scenes, but Gaffney and Berry do that repeatedly throughout Three Rooms.
Dan’s art adds to that mix of surrealism, pathos and comedy enormously, his expressions on Valerie’s face as she argues with her cast of deceased boyfriends had me giggling away, but at the same time feeling sorry for her (actually Dan’s art had me roaring with laughter on a number of occasions, those expressions cracked me up). It also makes you pause and think – we all have little fantasies and daydreams, little narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves and our lives. Perhaps, thankfully, not to the surreal extreme Valerie has, but pretty much every person does have them, and that means we can all see a little of ourselves in Valerie, the hopes, the fears, the failings, the coping mechanisms; she’s not exactly a mirror to the reader, but she is perhaps a distorting reflection reminding us none of us are perfect and each of us tries some mental tricks and stories to help us deal with life’s slings and arrows, each of us could easily be Valerie.
That this is all delivered with a delightful level of humour – and a humour that steers away from meanness, it’s not laughing at Valerie’s foibles and failings – Gaffney’s script and Berry’s art working hand in glove, the dialogue and the imagery, especially during Valerie’s talks with her deceased beaus are so nicely timed together, they hit all the right beats. And I haven’t even mentioned the elves yet… Is all of this in Valeries’s imagination? I’m guessing so, the title certainly hints at it, but wisely Gaffney and Berry refrain form making it entirely clear, it’s up to the reader, and that means we have to empathise more with Valerie and her problems if we’re to come to our own conclusions, so it draws us deeper in. And it doesn’t really matter if it is in her mind or real, either way the emotional problems are real to Valerie. Funny, poignant, surreal and still warmly emotional and human, a delight to read.
Joe Gordon, Forbidden Planet
Page 45
The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head
“You can discover everything about your boyfriend by tossing a breakable object at him.”
That’s such a lovely line, lobbed in as effortlessly and unexpectedly as everything else, taking the reader – and Valerie’s boyfriend – completely by surprise. It’s not done in anger but out of calm curiosity, and the trajectory of that particular sequence will prove even more startling and funny than you think.
We will return to that anon.
Dan Berry’s exceptionally expressive cartooning you may already know fromTHE END, CARRY ME, THROW YOUR KEYS AWAY, the Eisner-Award-nominated 24 BY 7 or THE SUITCASE, a former Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month, and far, far more. The singularly dextrous David Gaffney will now be shooting to the top of your attention and the forefront of your radar, once the wit in this read has been savoured. It is ever so carefully constructed.
There are three rooms in Valerie’s mind: a front, a back, and a cellar. But if you think that the front room’s a living room, you are very much mistaken. All she does there is obsess.
What should perhaps command her attention is studiously buried and ignored by banishing it into the back room.
What Valerie takes out to play instead are the ghosts of her former boyfriends, resurrected from the cellar, positioned like a trad-jazz band and articulated by herself. It is they whom she converses with throughout, wondering where it all went wrong.
“The drawback was having no space in the front room for anything else.”
Well, quite.
Before you leap to too many conclusions, I promised you surprises and I don’t break my promises. There may well be a very good reason why Valerie is so retrospective. And before you go blaming Valerie for being so unlucky in love, the individuals who’ll be paraded in front of you will prove to have looked through odd prisms of their own. Ever such odd prisms. One, for example, invents a car windscreen to compensate for his myopia so that he doesn’t have to wear his glasses or corrective lenses while driving. Which is fine for him and it’s a genius foil against car thieves. Unless they possess the same prescription as he does, they won’t be able to see what’s in front of them. On the other hand, it’s a wee bit rubbish for any passengers he’s carrying and his own rear-view mirror may prove something of a blur.
There’s a lot of allusion and metaphor in this comic, but I swear that it’s sweet and not half as heavy-handed as my own. “Symbols should not be cymbals,” as Edward Albee once wrote.
Music is one of the big ones, specifically Mahler’s 2nd Symphony plus Valerie’s love of accordions and other bellow-based instruments. Don’t think you have to be an all-knowing clever clogs because I’m certainly not. Listen to Gaffney about music instead:
“It’s pure. Music doesn’t imitate, it doesn’t explain, it doesn’t try to be like other things.”
I’d not thought of that before. Most drawings, paintings, prose, poetry and comics all seek to create, recreate, imitate or elucidate on that which they are not: life, real or imagined. Words convey thoughts, actions or occasions as best they can and I adore them for that, leaving me with the freedom to let my imagination roam. Images imply or are otherwise representational. Music may elicit or imply, but otherwise it is its own beast. In the hands of the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser even songs’ lyrics are left to be similarly ethereal because she left her voice free to be a musical instrument – no real words at all…
But this is a comic with images which do imitate ever so subtly well, and one of its best is the page in which Valerie responds to a former boyfriend’s recollection of their shared, supposedly idyllic past which doesn’t chime favourably enough with her own. The colouring aside, which is mood-specific throughout and beyond this specific page, it’s the body language and expressions which delight. Jake’s finger and closed eyes turn a contradiction – bad enough in Valerie’s eyes – into something close to a rebuke. As to those eyes, narrowed in the fourth panel as she leads challengingly forward, they really do seethe and spit daggers.
“Valerie,” we learn later, “kept a ball of tissue under her armpit and dropped shreds of it into his food to keep him loyal.”
This is an observational gem, more fanciful and energetic than Tomine’s but no less perceptive and far more engaging in that the reader is enticed into the recollections as an active observer on the spot rather than a witness at a distance. Dan has gone to great lengths to make this so, including a sequence which – I was told in complete confidence – he drew with his left hand in order to accentuate the giddiness which worked all too well on myself, giving me an immediate sense of vertigo while lying flat on my back in bed. That’s no mean feat.
So we return to the where we came in with the opening quotation and its reprise of the vase on the very second page which Valerie’s so intent on remaining oblivious to. I showed you that vase earlier on. Like so many other visual refrains repeated unexpectedly throughout, it’s a fab piece of foreshadowing whose exceptional choreography by Dan Berry is surpassed here as Valerie throws caution to the wind and a bouquet at her boyf. in an act of abandonment which is – to her – delightful spontaneity.
“You can discover everything about your boyfriend by tossing a breakable object at him.”
As the shining white and blue china hurtles towards him, Brett freeze, recoils and cowers in terror, and the leaves and flowers begin to tumble from their fragile, spinning vessel.
“Is he poised?
“Confident in his judgements?
“Does he seem willing to take responsibility for someone else’s actions?”
David Gaffney has a way with words which dance around and right off the pages to stick with you forever. There’s nothing extraneous or laden. Instead they trill so brightly and lightly like a musical movement that’s subtle and always heading somewhere. As often as not, they’re headed somewhere far from expected.
“You learn the most if the object belongs to someone else.”
SLH
Check out Page 45 here
The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head
“You can discover everything about your boyfriend by tossing a breakable object at him.”
That’s such a lovely line, lobbed in as effortlessly and unexpectedly as everything else, taking the reader – and Valerie’s boyfriend – completely by surprise. It’s not done in anger but out of calm curiosity, and the trajectory of that particular sequence will prove even more startling and funny than you think.
We will return to that anon.
Dan Berry’s exceptionally expressive cartooning you may already know fromTHE END, CARRY ME, THROW YOUR KEYS AWAY, the Eisner-Award-nominated 24 BY 7 or THE SUITCASE, a former Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month, and far, far more. The singularly dextrous David Gaffney will now be shooting to the top of your attention and the forefront of your radar, once the wit in this read has been savoured. It is ever so carefully constructed.
There are three rooms in Valerie’s mind: a front, a back, and a cellar. But if you think that the front room’s a living room, you are very much mistaken. All she does there is obsess.
What should perhaps command her attention is studiously buried and ignored by banishing it into the back room.
What Valerie takes out to play instead are the ghosts of her former boyfriends, resurrected from the cellar, positioned like a trad-jazz band and articulated by herself. It is they whom she converses with throughout, wondering where it all went wrong.
“The drawback was having no space in the front room for anything else.”
Well, quite.
Before you leap to too many conclusions, I promised you surprises and I don’t break my promises. There may well be a very good reason why Valerie is so retrospective. And before you go blaming Valerie for being so unlucky in love, the individuals who’ll be paraded in front of you will prove to have looked through odd prisms of their own. Ever such odd prisms. One, for example, invents a car windscreen to compensate for his myopia so that he doesn’t have to wear his glasses or corrective lenses while driving. Which is fine for him and it’s a genius foil against car thieves. Unless they possess the same prescription as he does, they won’t be able to see what’s in front of them. On the other hand, it’s a wee bit rubbish for any passengers he’s carrying and his own rear-view mirror may prove something of a blur.
There’s a lot of allusion and metaphor in this comic, but I swear that it’s sweet and not half as heavy-handed as my own. “Symbols should not be cymbals,” as Edward Albee once wrote.
Music is one of the big ones, specifically Mahler’s 2nd Symphony plus Valerie’s love of accordions and other bellow-based instruments. Don’t think you have to be an all-knowing clever clogs because I’m certainly not. Listen to Gaffney about music instead:
“It’s pure. Music doesn’t imitate, it doesn’t explain, it doesn’t try to be like other things.”
I’d not thought of that before. Most drawings, paintings, prose, poetry and comics all seek to create, recreate, imitate or elucidate on that which they are not: life, real or imagined. Words convey thoughts, actions or occasions as best they can and I adore them for that, leaving me with the freedom to let my imagination roam. Images imply or are otherwise representational. Music may elicit or imply, but otherwise it is its own beast. In the hands of the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser even songs’ lyrics are left to be similarly ethereal because she left her voice free to be a musical instrument – no real words at all…
But this is a comic with images which do imitate ever so subtly well, and one of its best is the page in which Valerie responds to a former boyfriend’s recollection of their shared, supposedly idyllic past which doesn’t chime favourably enough with her own. The colouring aside, which is mood-specific throughout and beyond this specific page, it’s the body language and expressions which delight. Jake’s finger and closed eyes turn a contradiction – bad enough in Valerie’s eyes – into something close to a rebuke. As to those eyes, narrowed in the fourth panel as she leads challengingly forward, they really do seethe and spit daggers.
“Valerie,” we learn later, “kept a ball of tissue under her armpit and dropped shreds of it into his food to keep him loyal.”
This is an observational gem, more fanciful and energetic than Tomine’s but no less perceptive and far more engaging in that the reader is enticed into the recollections as an active observer on the spot rather than a witness at a distance. Dan has gone to great lengths to make this so, including a sequence which – I was told in complete confidence – he drew with his left hand in order to accentuate the giddiness which worked all too well on myself, giving me an immediate sense of vertigo while lying flat on my back in bed. That’s no mean feat.
So we return to the where we came in with the opening quotation and its reprise of the vase on the very second page which Valerie’s so intent on remaining oblivious to. I showed you that vase earlier on. Like so many other visual refrains repeated unexpectedly throughout, it’s a fab piece of foreshadowing whose exceptional choreography by Dan Berry is surpassed here as Valerie throws caution to the wind and a bouquet at her boyf. in an act of abandonment which is – to her – delightful spontaneity.
“You can discover everything about your boyfriend by tossing a breakable object at him.”
As the shining white and blue china hurtles towards him, Brett freeze, recoils and cowers in terror, and the leaves and flowers begin to tumble from their fragile, spinning vessel.
“Is he poised?
“Confident in his judgements?
“Does he seem willing to take responsibility for someone else’s actions?”
David Gaffney has a way with words which dance around and right off the pages to stick with you forever. There’s nothing extraneous or laden. Instead they trill so brightly and lightly like a musical movement that’s subtle and always heading somewhere. As often as not, they’re headed somewhere far from expected.
“You learn the most if the object belongs to someone else.”
SLH
Check out Page 45 here
Geeks worldwide February 2018
There are times you might want to take a break from the heroes of the comic book world and dive into something a bit more down to earth. The Three Rooms in Valerie’s Head is an excellent example of that. In this 120-page trade paperback, we meet Valerie and get to see into her interior life. Like so many of us, Valerie has been unlucky in love but always believes that it will be different the next time. What makes her a little more unique is what she does with her exes. At least what she does in her head with them. I am no jazz expert, but I am pretty sure this is not the best way to form a band, Val.
Along with the mental fund shi that we get to see, this comic also allows us to follow Valerie in her quest for love. This series is both deep and funny with how it deals with situations a lot of us have been in. David and Dan make you care about Val very early on and you want to see her succeed. But who can save somebody who does not seem ready to be saved? My money would be on Stanley, he is something special. I will not spoil anything in this review because I do not want you, dear readers, to have any preconceived ideas on how things will play out.
The art in this book may seem very simple, but it works with the story. It also helps that it does not take away from the dialogue. It amazes me anytime an artist can create a cartoon style and make it feel real. You will look at the pages and recognize people and places. Sometimes it will be someplace well known, or a person only you know. I believe that this is a universal comic that so many people will enjoy.
