Self Help #1

by Owen King, Marianna Ignazzi (artist), Jesse Kellerman

A surreal and colorful world populated with two-faced talk-show hosts, cheerful Finnish mobsters, bloodthirsty white supremacists, snide English butlers, and panther-wielding Euro-trash assassins.
Down-on-his-luck rideshare driver Jerry Hauser’s existence is a bleak one…especially because every fare he picks up tells him how much he looks like uber-successful self-help guru Darren Hart. But after a twist of fate, Jerry is given the chance of a lifetime…which, if he’s not careful, may well end his lifetime. So begins this California noir—a rollicking and gleefully lurid pulp crime story for our time.
Collects SELF HELP #1-5

Genres: Graphic Novels

140 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 12, 2025

About the author

I'm the author of the novels The Curator and Double Feature, We're All In This Together: A Novella and Stories, co-editor (with John McNally) of the anthology Who Can Save Us Now, and co-author (with Mark Poirier) of the graphic novel Intro to Alien Invasion. I also co-wrote the novel Sleeping Beauties with Stephen King. My most recent work is the ongoing comic book series Self Help, co-written with Jesse Kellerman and illustrated by Mariana Ignazzi.

My wife is the beautiful and mysterious Kelly Braffet. She has written five wonderful books, and the newest is The Broken Tower.

Here are what a couple of my favorite authors were nice enough to say about Double Feature:

“What a kinetic, joyful, gonzo ride—Double Feature made me laugh so loudly on a plane that I had to describe the plot of Sam's Spruce Moose of a debut film (it stars a satyr) to my seatmate by way of explanation. Booth and Sam are an unforgettable Oedipal duo. A book that delivers walloping pleasures to its lucky readers.” - Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

“Sharp, hilarious, and irreverent, Double Feature is not only a love-letter to cinema, but also a moving exploration of what it means to be an artist. This novel is brilliant, and Owen King is a magician.” - Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies and Arcadia

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

I'm a big fan of the other King boy*, but I think this is my first encounter with brother Owen's work, and on this sample I can't say I'm sold. A deadbeat definitely-not-Uber driver with a startling resemblance to a popular life coach? OK, could work as a set-up, and obviously we know who's going to get in his car soon enough, but that's OK. Still, once we've established he was a former con man, why is he so bad at the ensuing impersonation? The art doesn't help; it'll be gorgeous one minute, and the face work is generally strong (at least on the adults), but then you'll get a freeway scene where the cars somehow look like they're going backwards, and a few times the storytelling is entirely unclear. Adding a backstory where our antihero screwed over the prison Aryans just feels like reheated Breaking Bad, though I suppose right now having everything derailed by Nazis is at least timely. And by the end of this volume I don't feel we've got any kind of point beyond 'there's not much difference between life coaches, trash TV hosts and confidence tricksters' which, yes, obviously, but is that it? Still, there's a scene where someone gets brained with a LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE plaque, so it's not all bad.

*Though if I ever registered before I clearly forgot again that, besides avoiding accusations of nepotism, publishing as Joe Hill also saved him from being Joe King. He even did a comic about a stand-up, FFS. I suppose this makes further sense of all those daddy issues in his early books.