It’s a nice, short read and I appreciate the layers Healey is trying to peel back and deconstruct but I don’t feel like I would be reading it over either as an autobiographical work or as a portrayal of mental health. The Con Artists by Luke Healy is my favourite graphic novel of the year so far, and to be honest, it might just be among my favourite comics ever.

Moving in with and caring for his estranged childhood friend quickly starts to chip away at Frank’s sense of self, as well as Giogio’s carefully curated online persona. A great story of friendship, or rather, nostalgia for a bygone friendship, a fantasy, you might even say. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Luke Healy is a master at creating genuine characters with stories that never fail to pull me in and keep me there. Frank only wanted three things this year— to perform stand-up comedy, go to therapy, and to keep his house plants alive.I enjoyed Luke Healy's Americana, a memoir of Luke taking his Irish self to the West Coast of the US to complete an arduous hike. Healy's depiction of toxic and manipulative relationships and how those relationships end is familiar and as we know relationships even mostly onesided ones often don't end in a way we find satisfying. The Con Artists’ art style is clean and legible, and the writing has many standout jokes and profound lines that linger on the mind. But I never found myself much caring about what happened to anyone - and I particularly didn't care for the higher concepts Luke Healy seemed determined to introduce. The simplicity of the artwork worked really well with the uncomplicated dialogue, and at times it worked excellently as a combo to bring forth more complex emotions.

This was an interesting concept and the simple art style was nice, but it just didn’t quite do it for me. We wondered whether given Frank’s considerable anxieties of Giorgio’s state of mind and living arrangements Giorgio might have once been an object of Frank’s affections, but there is no other suggestion of this within the comic. One of the funniest books you will ever read…’ -Irish Times ‘A quietly brilliant story of old friends and secret lives. It’s definitely an interesting exploration of fraught interpersonal relationships complicated by anxiety. If you are a vulnerable person, you hang on to that someone all the more tightly, certain that this someone will be there for you when others haven't.My favourite graphic novel of the year so far, and to be honest, it might just be among my favourite comics ever .