What do you think?
Rate this book
Drop-In
Similar in tone to the legendary comic series Duplex Planet, Lapp’s first graphic novel is a collection of stories about his work as an art teacher in an inner city Toronto youth drop-in centre. His students are full of stories which they are eager to share. These include a family who picks worms at night on their knees, Vietnamese refugees, rope-jumping girls, Venus flytraps, bullies and tamagotchis. With a warmth of line and a uniquely charming storytelling style, Lapp’s comics evoke the work of Chester Brown, and his black humour that of Joe Ollmann.
160 pages, Paperback
First published October 31, 2008
26 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 2, 2017
I have conflicted feelings about this work. Dave Lapp shares stories from his time working at an art drop-in centre for kids. His stories feel honest and unflinching in their portrayal of his experience but the stories are told through an outsider's lens. Lapp seems removed from the kids and people he includes in his book and, as such, it feels like he depicts them as though they are "other" from him. Some of the stories he includes, such as a homeless person following him to the subway, express his discomfort with some of the difficult social interactions he experiences. Although his discomfort is valid, some of the stories end up coming across as though Lapp has included it for the singular purpose to show that the people he encounters are "crazy" or different from him. The majority of the stories center on his role of art instructor and his attempts to teach and help. With that in mind, I honestly think he is trying to understand the people he meets and later writes about but some of the stories really fall flat and feel more like a spectacle, rather than a humanizing portrayal.
June 8, 2020
Content warnings include Lapp being a bystander to bullying and what I suspect is behavior of a child who has been sexually abused. Although that's never addressed in the text itself.
Drop-In by Dave Lapp was published in Canada by Conundrum Press in 2008 and gifted to me a couple of years ago. It was nominated in 2009 for the Ignatz Awards Outstanding Graphic Novel and for the Doug Wright Awards' Best Book. An excerpt was also published in Best American Comics 2010. Which strikes me as a bit odd, but whatever. I'm having a hard time tracking down much about Dave Lapp, but he is also a character in Drop-In. From this representation of himself, Lapp appears to see himself as a pretty basic white guy from the suburbs where nothing bad ever happened. He has a brother, decent at art, and pretty chill.
Flipping the book over, as we do, Drop-In is described as follows " Similar in tone to the legendary comic series Duplex Planet, Lapp's first graphic novel is a collection of stories about his work as an art teacher in an inner city Toronto youth drop-in centre. His students are full of stories which they are eager to share. These include a family who picks worms at night on their knees, Vietnamese refugees, rope-jumping girls, Venus flytraps, bullies and tamagotchis. With a warmth of line and a uniquely charming storytelling style, Lapp's comics evoke the work of Chester Brown, and his black humour that of Joe Ollmann."
The art style that Lapp uses is pretty striking with dark dramatic lines. I can't help but mention that the rigid four frame page layout reminds me a lot of Chester Brown, with maybe a bit less personal detail, and more zoomed in on the characters. He also thanks Joe Ollmann, a Hamilton cartoonist in the dedication. This book is extremely accessible to not comic readers and might be a good way to introduce someone to the medium.
That said, I definitely have mixed feelings about this collection of stories. For one, upon finishing this book I flipped straight back to the metric's page to see if there were any notes about name changes or permissions to tell these personal stories! But nothing. I certainly hope it's safe to assume that Lapp has done something and isn't just publishing about other people willy nilly. It certainly would have set a good example for others who might be inspired by this book, and been reassuring to the rest of us who care about the huge differential in power presented in these situations.
While this might feel like nitpicking, because I'm always worried I'm nitpicking too much, I feel like the way Lapp and the kids he works with is concerning. While he is presented with some personality, and his internal voice narrates many of the stories, there are still a lot of ways that Lapp is presented as the self-insert character with everyone else as other. A fish out of water, nothing that happens in front of Lapp relates to anything else in his life.
While sexuality is not really touched on at all, there's a pretty good percent of people who apparently fall fully on one side or the other of the gender binary. With stories often featuring a lot of girls.
There is one character who appears to be intellectually disabled, although I honestly don't know how this relates to best language practices so I will be looking into that. Anyway, the only disability representation was this man who harassed little girls. As someone who has only recently has started working through all of my ablest ideas and biases it was sadly relatable to not be sure what to do when someone who I perceive as more difficult to communicate to acts out. That said, setting up the only person who has disabilities as a kind of dangerous predator on young girls, without any resolution, is bad. Or, you know, seems to indicate that Lapp is incapable of providing safe space for children?
Class and race are also not treated that well in my humble opinion. Not to say that Lapp should not have shared stories about the poor racialized people he works with (although again I would circle back to checking how they feel about these stories) but that, as a more white person who comes from a more middle class background, the ways that these points are used to present everyone else as other is highly problematic. Similar to the story I highlighted for the disability representation, there's another story (now outside of Lapp's purview) about two girls who wear hijabs who bully other girls at school quite violently. Not to say nothing like this would ever happen, but it seems in very poor taste and adds nothing to the world.
Before I conclude I guess I should recognize that there are a lot of limits on what Lapp could do personally. All levels of government are complicit in poverty, and often use it as an implicit threat against all people who fall outside of poverty to be sure to stay in line and keep working away productively. As I often say, it's difficult to critique people's real life, but Lapp (along with many others and in contrast to the rest of us) have chosen to put these words down on the page and share what is happening around them. And while not every story made me deeply uncomfortable, and not everything needs an easily identifiable point, the lackadaisical nature of the book lets all of my negative feelings really boil to the top because there is no counter point to hold onto. I rated this book two out of five stars.
Drop-In by Dave Lapp was published in Canada by Conundrum Press in 2008 and gifted to me a couple of years ago. It was nominated in 2009 for the Ignatz Awards Outstanding Graphic Novel and for the Doug Wright Awards' Best Book. An excerpt was also published in Best American Comics 2010. Which strikes me as a bit odd, but whatever. I'm having a hard time tracking down much about Dave Lapp, but he is also a character in Drop-In. From this representation of himself, Lapp appears to see himself as a pretty basic white guy from the suburbs where nothing bad ever happened. He has a brother, decent at art, and pretty chill.
Flipping the book over, as we do, Drop-In is described as follows " Similar in tone to the legendary comic series Duplex Planet, Lapp's first graphic novel is a collection of stories about his work as an art teacher in an inner city Toronto youth drop-in centre. His students are full of stories which they are eager to share. These include a family who picks worms at night on their knees, Vietnamese refugees, rope-jumping girls, Venus flytraps, bullies and tamagotchis. With a warmth of line and a uniquely charming storytelling style, Lapp's comics evoke the work of Chester Brown, and his black humour that of Joe Ollmann."
The art style that Lapp uses is pretty striking with dark dramatic lines. I can't help but mention that the rigid four frame page layout reminds me a lot of Chester Brown, with maybe a bit less personal detail, and more zoomed in on the characters. He also thanks Joe Ollmann, a Hamilton cartoonist in the dedication. This book is extremely accessible to not comic readers and might be a good way to introduce someone to the medium.
That said, I definitely have mixed feelings about this collection of stories. For one, upon finishing this book I flipped straight back to the metric's page to see if there were any notes about name changes or permissions to tell these personal stories! But nothing. I certainly hope it's safe to assume that Lapp has done something and isn't just publishing about other people willy nilly. It certainly would have set a good example for others who might be inspired by this book, and been reassuring to the rest of us who care about the huge differential in power presented in these situations.
While this might feel like nitpicking, because I'm always worried I'm nitpicking too much, I feel like the way Lapp and the kids he works with is concerning. While he is presented with some personality, and his internal voice narrates many of the stories, there are still a lot of ways that Lapp is presented as the self-insert character with everyone else as other. A fish out of water, nothing that happens in front of Lapp relates to anything else in his life.
While sexuality is not really touched on at all, there's a pretty good percent of people who apparently fall fully on one side or the other of the gender binary. With stories often featuring a lot of girls.
There is one character who appears to be intellectually disabled, although I honestly don't know how this relates to best language practices so I will be looking into that. Anyway, the only disability representation was this man who harassed little girls. As someone who has only recently has started working through all of my ablest ideas and biases it was sadly relatable to not be sure what to do when someone who I perceive as more difficult to communicate to acts out. That said, setting up the only person who has disabilities as a kind of dangerous predator on young girls, without any resolution, is bad. Or, you know, seems to indicate that Lapp is incapable of providing safe space for children?
Class and race are also not treated that well in my humble opinion. Not to say that Lapp should not have shared stories about the poor racialized people he works with (although again I would circle back to checking how they feel about these stories) but that, as a more white person who comes from a more middle class background, the ways that these points are used to present everyone else as other is highly problematic. Similar to the story I highlighted for the disability representation, there's another story (now outside of Lapp's purview) about two girls who wear hijabs who bully other girls at school quite violently. Not to say nothing like this would ever happen, but it seems in very poor taste and adds nothing to the world.
Before I conclude I guess I should recognize that there are a lot of limits on what Lapp could do personally. All levels of government are complicit in poverty, and often use it as an implicit threat against all people who fall outside of poverty to be sure to stay in line and keep working away productively. As I often say, it's difficult to critique people's real life, but Lapp (along with many others and in contrast to the rest of us) have chosen to put these words down on the page and share what is happening around them. And while not every story made me deeply uncomfortable, and not everything needs an easily identifiable point, the lackadaisical nature of the book lets all of my negative feelings really boil to the top because there is no counter point to hold onto. I rated this book two out of five stars.
July 7, 2012
some interesting story lines, nicely drawn, but no "wow" factor for me.
June 11, 2024
I enjoy the lines, and the stories shared are interesting, but I couldn't move beyond the feeling that this felt like spectacle. Because these are real people and real stories, I had a real discomfort - which isn't a bad thing, art can evoke discomfort and that doesn't make it bad. That the author, and thus we as readers, are outsiders is abundantly clear - that's fine. It felt like we were also just dropping in to the lives of these various children. Who, and maybe this is my biggest issue, are real people - these are real stories and I couldn't help but wonder if they agreed to having these stories published, or a profit made from their lives. Murky ethics for me.
April 11, 2012
Drop-In may be labeled a graphic novel, but it's actually a graphic collection of short ethnographic and autoethnographic vignettes. Each piece chronicles Lapp's experiences working as an art instructor with children and teens in several drop-in centres in Toronto.
Dave Lapp's book lives in an interesting intersection of anthropology, practitioner inquiry, and visual art. It thus raises a lot of interesting questions about how an observer/researcher chooses to represent his subjects of study and their words/works, what happens when an observer is not on the periphery of his research, and how an artist may choose to frame his and others' experiences.
If only these vignettes had been a little bit longer...
I'm sure that many people love a short vignette for its poetic or 'snapshot' qualities, but I'd have appreciated some long-form graphic ethnographic pieces. I do consider Drop-In to be primarily a work of anthropology--regardless of whether or not Lapp has studied as an anthropologist--and so I craved the deep insights that Lapp could provide. Alas, each episode ends succinctly. Such is life.
Dave Lapp's book lives in an interesting intersection of anthropology, practitioner inquiry, and visual art. It thus raises a lot of interesting questions about how an observer/researcher chooses to represent his subjects of study and their words/works, what happens when an observer is not on the periphery of his research, and how an artist may choose to frame his and others' experiences.
If only these vignettes had been a little bit longer...
I'm sure that many people love a short vignette for its poetic or 'snapshot' qualities, but I'd have appreciated some long-form graphic ethnographic pieces. I do consider Drop-In to be primarily a work of anthropology--regardless of whether or not Lapp has studied as an anthropologist--and so I craved the deep insights that Lapp could provide. Alas, each episode ends succinctly. Such is life.
December 1, 2010
I picked this up in Brookline when I went to Johann's housewarming. Ben and I drew a florescent animal dance troupe while a grandma looked over our shoulders and told us how cool it was. It was cool. I spent Thanksgiving Day in bed feeling awful and reading this book. I don't know if it contributed to me not being able to get out of bed, or finally getting up. It's about a guy who works at a drop in art center in a city and the characters he meets day to day when he is open to the action.
December 27, 2010
It's accurate to say that I devoured this book. One of the reviews of it in the Toronto Star, I believe, notes that Lapp often is a passive presence in these vignettes, that he passes judgment with his very helplessness in the face of the social conditions in which he works. At first that bothered me, but I also totally empathize. It reminded me of some of the experiences I've had in my previous job. But nothing as intense as is in here.
July 5, 2010
A quick read with an array of vignettes about a drop-in art center in inner-city Toronto, told from the perspective of an middle class kid who takes on a job there. He describes hilarious and disturbing stories about the adults and kids who frequent the center and the neighborhood around it.
October 4, 2013
Realistic portraits of troubled kids and teens at a local drop-in centre and the earnest, helpful white guy who delivers art therapy to those who need it most. Lots of unlikable people and some micro-narratives with poignant or humourour moments.
December 27, 2009
I liked this; it reminded me of some of my own experiences working with children.
November 28, 2012
Depressing with a light hearted ending. I really liked it. Pretty heavy though.
March 10, 2013
I like the premise but I am not quite sure - other than a series of vignettes - what Lapp wants to say with this book!
January 1, 2018
Boring & this drop-in worker is racist as hell
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews