My actual rating of this is 4.5 stars. I'm knocking off half a star for the ending, which was too abrupt for me and not conclusive enough - I'm not averse to ambiguous endings, but this one just sort of petered out. It wasn't even merely anticlimactic. It just sort of... wasn't. Things were happening, things were going to happen, and then they just sort of happened but really quickly and vaguely. It was a real shame because I could tell what the author was trying to achieve and it just didn't quite work, and after being so enthralled with the rest of the comic, it felt incredibly disappointing to be let down by just the last 10 or so pages.

However, that said, the rest of the comic was such an enjoyable experience that I'm not going to knock down the rating too much. It's important to note that, generally speaking, I'm not particularly enamoured of graphic novels, being one of those awfully pretentious folk who considers a novel to be an entity consisting solely of words. My experience with the genre extends as far as Maus and Persepolis, both of which are rather a far cry from this webcomic. I only picked up this comic (initially in book form) on the recommendation of a friend, who knew my reservations about graphic novels but somehow managed to convince me to overcome my snobbery and read it anyway. And really, thank God she did. The characterisation is some of the best I've ever seen in dialogue-only work. TJ is one of the most interesting characters I've come across, and I kept wishing he were real so that we could become best friends for life and braid each other's hair. I found Amal slightly less interesting, but not because he's any less rendered; he's just less my kind of person. The rapport between the two of them was so well crafted, too. To borrow one of those horrible buzzwords, it seemed very organic - the relationship between them grew very naturally, and nothing was forced at all. This is probably due to the length of time that the work took to create; the author had rather a long time to consider how she was going to develop everything. If only all authors were constrained as such.

The highpoint for me was the dialogue. It's incredibly authentic, and manages to be both poignant and hilarious at various points. The creator of this comic is both a highly skilled artist and writer, and it really does show. Considering the number of years that this took to complete, the artistic style is incredibly consistent. If you hold up the first page and compare it to the last page, there are some obvious improvements in style and finesse, but no real change. This is far from a bad thing as it makes the whole thing flow very well. If I hadn't been one of those people who read it as it went along, I would probably have been convinced that it had only taken a year or so (an impossible feat, I'm sure!).

I should add here that I read the first part of the text in book form, borrowing volume 1 from a friend, then read the entirety of part 2 and some of part 3 online in one evening, then read the next quarter of part 3 in real time updates, then got impatient and stopped reading (save for a few times when I thought to myself 'oh, I wonder how my old pals TJ and Amal are doing' and then read the odd few pages that had been released since I last looked) and then finally read all the rest of it in one evening after it was finished. So my experience with this particular text really took place over the course of about 2 years, whereas I know that others invested 6 years from beginning to end. Crazy stuff. I've picked up a few other webcomics since and tried to be one of those people who checks back every week for an update, but that way of life just isn't for me, man. I was built for different things. I may have overcome my distaste for the unwritten word, but I'll never be the kind of person who manages to successfully follow a webcomic. Thank God this one was released in print form, that's all I'm saying.

The only other problem I had with it is that I am not a huge fan of graphically depicted sex. I'm the kind of person who skips those sections in novels (and then inevitably misses a huge plot point when the murderer's name is revealed mid-coitus) and watches films with my hands over my eyes at salient points (har). I think it's just a second-hand embarrassment thing. Maybe I should talk to someone about it. Anyway, that meant that there were whole pages of this graphic novel that I just didn't read because they weren't to my taste. However, that's entirely my own problem, and I'm remiss to knock the rating down because of it. If you like to look at people doin' the do - and hey, I'm not judging - then you'll probably get a lot out of those pages that I skipped. So, no complaints about it here, just a warning to those who feel the same way as I do that you might end up turning a few pages in quick succession.

This book is the kind of text that makes me wish there were a film adaptation, because come on - a road trip movie with this level of subtext / subplot would make for an interesting watch indeed. Sure, I'd have to watch a few scenes from between my fingers, but the soundtrack would be awesome. If anyone is reading this and happens to own a film production company, you know what to do.