Image by MingalabaYAH via Flickr
Catch As Catch Can
Written and drawn by: Greg Cook
Published by: Highwater Books
Run, run as fast as you can!
You can’t catch me!
I’m the Gingerbread Man!
So it turns out that the Gingerbread Man has a lot more on his mind than just avoiding carnivorous grandmothers.
Author and artist Greg Cook’s Gingerbread man is…well, he’s scum. When he’s not pandering ice cream to children out of the back of a beat-up old truck, he’s buying those same kids cigarettes. Gingerbread Man’s actions inevitably draw the attention–and ire–of the local police, who begin a cat-and-mouse game with the lowly anthropomorphic cookie.
Why is Gingerbread Man scum? Why does he procure contraband for kids, engage in high-speed chases with the police, and generally just be a bad guy?
He’s bored.
His life sucks, he’s lonely, he works a dead-end job–Gingerbread Man really doesn’t have a whole lot going for him. He craves what many of us secretly crave when life has us down–action, adventure, intrigue…SOMETHING to break the inescapable ennui life can sometimes become.
Gingerbread Man ultimately does find action and adventure, though hardly the kind he must secretly have fantasized about. Pitted against diabolical foes who would seek to harm–that is, eat–him, Gingerbread Man goes about creating a new life, one more virtuous, more stable, more suited to him. Whether he finds such a life remains a poignant rhetorical the reader must ask himself or herself.
What is most striking about Catch As Catch Can is not the overall quality of the narration or the artwork–indeed, both leave much to be desired. Cook’s renderings are strange and uncomfortable, though I cannot say whether that was intentional on his part. The writing is at times dull, at times vibrant, and collectively average at best.
No, neither lines nor words make this story sing; rather, it is the journey Gingerbread Man takes, and the context and settings in which he takes that journey.
Above all else, Gingerbread Man is a survivor, one who yearns to transcend the pit of despair and existential crisis into which he finds himself sinking ever deeper, ever deeper. Cook may not know how to tell a good story, nor does he necessarily know how to illustrate one–but he sure nows how to pick his subject matter.
Give this book a shot. You may very well be disappointed, but you may also find something special, something that exists just below the line of visibility. You may just find what I found–a quiet, hushed, almost inaudible subtext that speaks volumes about the depths of depravity we can so easily and so often find ourselves in.
