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Mine Tonight
In Mine Tonight, individuals with high ideals and few scruples struggle and scheme among the backdrop of the second Bush administration, the giddy chaos of WTO protest-era Seattle, and the moral fog of post-9/11 New York. The tricks of memory and the ambiguity of politics add the the intrigue of a tale that is both intensely personal and widely relevant. Lukas, an amoral gun for hire, finds himself embroiled in the corruptions of the 2004 presidential election; his journey and demons are aggressively rendered in black and white drawings, which fluidly convey anger, fear, and motion.
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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November 20, 2022
Egh. I feel like Alixopulos is a better storyteller than this. The illustrations are compelling and wonderfully expressive, and the story is expressed well. I just didn't like this; it felt hollow, and had a number of bigoted bits.
This is vaguely inspired by the story of Fred Cuny, as told in Scott Anderson's The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearence of Fred Cuny. I have not read that book, but from what I can see of it online it's very unclear what the inspiration was beyond "person meets someone who is clearly George Soros but named differently, has problems with humanitarian funding issues, and eventually disappears." Maybe there are other critical story elements in common; there are definitely wild divergences between Cuny and this story's main character Lukas. The George-Soros-like character is a wildly antisemitic caricature under a Hungarian name as cover I guess? There's a weird early transphobic side story that seems to just be there to show that he is Well Traveled In Exotic Circumstances, and his low point in the plot is when he drunkenly sleeps with Alixopulos himself (it seems implied that this is low because he's sleeping with a man and he questions "who seduced who" as a parallel to his interactions with the Soros-like character, but that isn't directly stated). The story resolves with the Cuny-inspired character stealing a bunch of money and running away with a woman. For Cuny himself, it seems bizarre and hollow for someone supposedly driven by a desire to do humanitarian good without the financial abuses of many humanitarian orgs to turn around and do something like this. For this Cuny-inspired character, though, he seems overall more interested in himself, and uses frustration with what he's seen in humanitarian and political work as an apparent excuse for his nihilism and reckless behavior. It's just kind of sad to read.
This is vaguely inspired by the story of Fred Cuny, as told in Scott Anderson's The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearence of Fred Cuny. I have not read that book, but from what I can see of it online it's very unclear what the inspiration was beyond "person meets someone who is clearly George Soros but named differently, has problems with humanitarian funding issues, and eventually disappears." Maybe there are other critical story elements in common; there are definitely wild divergences between Cuny and this story's main character Lukas. The George-Soros-like character is a wildly antisemitic caricature under a Hungarian name as cover I guess? There's a weird early transphobic side story that seems to just be there to show that he is Well Traveled In Exotic Circumstances, and his low point in the plot is when he drunkenly sleeps with Alixopulos himself (it seems implied that this is low because he's sleeping with a man and he questions "who seduced who" as a parallel to his interactions with the Soros-like character, but that isn't directly stated). The story resolves with the Cuny-inspired character stealing a bunch of money and running away with a woman. For Cuny himself, it seems bizarre and hollow for someone supposedly driven by a desire to do humanitarian good without the financial abuses of many humanitarian orgs to turn around and do something like this. For this Cuny-inspired character, though, he seems overall more interested in himself, and uses frustration with what he's seen in humanitarian and political work as an apparent excuse for his nihilism and reckless behavior. It's just kind of sad to read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review