4/10/24: Reread with Spring 24 YAL class, and appreciated by many. Many in the class also read I am Not Okay With This, also by Forman, and appreciated (if not exactly "liked") it, too.
8/31/21: Reread for my summer comics class: The class either read this and/or read another Forsman book, I Am Not Okay With This, but those that read it appreciated the vibe, the portrait of an alienated psychopath boy and the lost girl who hangs with him though she knows she shouldn't.
Update late April 2021: As I read this with my Spring 2020 growing up class. No, I have not yet seen any of the tv series episodes, but I still might.
I might have said this is an "anti-romance" but the class noted that there are exchanges of love between the two, in spite of all the violence they engage in.
Original review, 6/15/20, somewhat edited: Y'all younguns probably knew the acronym TEOTFW was The End of the Fucking World. Cute. Like the YA novel TTYL. But not really. I had this on my TBR (see what I am doing here? so hip with my use of acronyms!) list for a long time, had tried and failed to get it through my library system and forgotten altogether what it was about. At first glance it looks a bit like the simply and sketchily drawn diary comics I had just read, Jeffery Brown, and Charles Schultz-influenced. A stripped-down, no-nonsense coming-of-age story about two disaffected and almost completely unlikable teens, James and Alyssa.
Then it turns dark. Bonnie and Clyde/Badlands/Natural Born Killers territory, but without much of the warmth/humor/love story of those precedents for this tale. Criminal road trip. It's a short version of the above, a story of a sociopath and a somewhat younger, more vulnerable girl, operating out of widening contexts of malaise/sadness/badlands. The Killer in Me (Thompson) noir psychopath territory. Alternating between the boy's and girl's perspectives, ending sadly with Alyssa's perspective. More brutally realist than those movies, in one sense, in that the kids are so sadly inarticulate and listless and clueless, but finally there remains a bit of pathos for Alyssa, one victim of James. And as one student reminds me, his last words in this story are in fact "I love you" so that is something to consider. This was unsettling and powerful and nasty and not exactly likable and yet admirable for its unromanticized achievement, a depiction of some teen types that rarely get memorialized in any way. Forsman's first graphic novel, and a good one.
On second reading I liked it a little less, not sure what it contributes to the sub-genre of psychopath lit. Except maybe this is convincingly under-class white bread America, soul-less, rudderless youth, though maybe Alyssa, in their visit to the father she hasn't seen in ten years, creates a little sympathy, and her following James in spite of his being such a jerk creates more sympathy for her. I read it for free through Hoopla.
On third reading I liked it a little more, again! It made me want to watch all those killers-on-the -road movies as a study of disaffected American violent culture. Not fun, okay, but maybe useful.