Insomnia Café

by M.K. Perker

I loved this graphic novel.  To begin with, it's the only comic I've ever read that has name-dropped Richard Brautigan's classic novel The Abortion, a favourite of mine from high school which I had kind of forgotten about, and now want to read again.

This comic, by Air and Cairo artist M.K. Perker is not really what I was expecting.  His work on those other two titles with G. Willow Wilson tend towards the magical realist, while this piece is a little more Kafkaesque in its plot and execution.

Peter Kolinsky is a disgraced expert on rare books.  He's been stuck in a dead-end publishing job since being fired from a prestigious auction house, and he is not very happy about it.  When a gangster rare book collector (of course they exist) comes to him to get his help in authenticating a book, he is forced to go on the run.  His journey takes him to the Insomnia Café, where he meets Angela, a worker there.  She ends up taking him into the Archives, a rare library that contains only books that haven't been published yet.  They appear on the shelves of the Archives as they are being written, and disappear once published.  There is an extensive Salinger collection, of course.

Okay, this aspect of the story is a little magical realist in a Borgesian fashion, but not in what happens next.  I don't want to spoil anything, except to say that the ending was not what I expected.

Perker is a sharp writer.  His characters and style in this book is more angular and piercing than his Vertigo work, but I like this change.  The prickliness of it suits characters like Kolinsky, who aren't very nice.  I would definitely like to see more work from Perker in this vein.