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A review by mschlat
Morton: A Cross-Country Rail Journey by David Collier
3.0
My wife picked this up and said "It's [a:Harvey Pekar|5125|Harvey Pekar|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1278951274p2/5125.jpg] gone horribly, horribly wrong." My evaluation isn't that harsh, but I can see where she's coming from. This is meant to be a story about David Collier and family taking a rail trip across Canada, but it's interspersed with Collier's anecdotes about growing up, historical tales of the towns they pass through, and even the occasional dig/regret about Collier's former publisher, Drawn & Quarterly.
The problem is that Collier is exhaustingly didactic. It's like the infodump you get from a dense Pekar piece, except that it almost never stops and jumps from topic to topic seemingly randomly. Trust me, there are good bits (I'm a big fan of how Collier's military background informs his thinking and particularly his packing), but you need to be willing to wade through a lot. (I will concede that you might get a lot more out of this if you are Canadian.) My other issue is the linework, which features extensive shading and crosshatching. The art is almost as dense as the story-telling.
Basically, unless you're a big fan of Collier, Canadian history, or Canadian rail, I would give this a pass.
The problem is that Collier is exhaustingly didactic. It's like the infodump you get from a dense Pekar piece, except that it almost never stops and jumps from topic to topic seemingly randomly. Trust me, there are good bits (I'm a big fan of how Collier's military background informs his thinking and particularly his packing), but you need to be willing to wade through a lot. (I will concede that you might get a lot more out of this if you are Canadian.) My other issue is the linework, which features extensive shading and crosshatching. The art is almost as dense as the story-telling.
Basically, unless you're a big fan of Collier, Canadian history, or Canadian rail, I would give this a pass.