Mister Punch. - book reviews

Commonweal, Dec 2, 1994 by Frank McConnell

And then there's Mister Punch (DC/Vertigo, $24.95, 96 pp.) It's written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by Dave McKean, and I repeat my earlier assertion in these pages that Gaiman may just be the most gifted and important storyteller in English. This stunning comic book-graphic novel - whatever - is easily the most haunting, inescapable story I've read in years. I won't even try to map its complexity for you, but it's about a boy (the young Neil) discovering, at the same time, the passion and perfidy of adult life, the terror of mortality, and the impossibly healing power of storytelling - storytelling incarnated in that crudest and most anarchic of plots, the Punch and Judy puppet show. I would say this about Faulkner, Blake, and not many others, but I say it about Gaiman: if you don't read Mister Punch, your life will be a little less radiant than it could be.

So there. If you love somebody, buy them one of these books, and if you love them a lot, buy them all. At the end of Christmas day, on the sofa in your bathrobe under the comforter - your brandy near at hand - could there be anything better than a finely told, brilliant story to enter into - on this day that commemorates one of the best of stories?

As Tiny Tim would have it, God bless them, every one. Most particularly, I add - it's my essay, sue me - Brother Gaiman.

Frank McConnell writes regularly in these pages on the media. When not watching TV, listening to jazz, or reading comic books, the abstemious McConnell teaches English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. McConnell has written criticism on the Bible as literature and on the modern novel. He is also the author of the Harry Garnish/Sister Bridget O'Toole mystery novel series (Walker and Company).