My War With Brian - Softcover

Rall, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1561632155 ISBN 13: 9781561632152

Publisher: NBM Publishing, 1998

Synopsis

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Outrageous Ted recounts his junior-high years in the hands of a merciless bully who just wouldn't let up. Ted, now a strapping fella over 6 feet happily lost in the Big Apple, was at the time a wimp egghead lost in the middle of Nowheresville, Heartland, USA, and hated it with a passion. This no-holds-barred recollection begs the question: was his attitude such that maybe he deserved it?

About this title

About the Author

Twice winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Ted Rall is a syndicated editorial cartoonist and columnist for Universal Press Syndicate. His previous books include To Afghanistan and Back, Revenge of the Latchkey Kids and 2024.

Reviews

YA-Political and social-commentary cartoonist Rall offers a fictionalized slice of his junior and senior high school experiences with the class bully. Because his story is told entirely from the perspective and with all the insight of the teenaged male protagonist, not only is the profanity profuse but other possibly offensive, yet realistically on-target, vocabulary abounds. Brian Koff may have been a bully but clearly young Rall offered him opportunity and excuse: the narrator shows himself to be somewhat conceited, defiantly classist, and ready to lash out with assorted weaponry. He hospitalizes Brian, plans his murder, and continues to demonstrate his own abilities to draw enemy blood all the way through high school. This is testosterone-driven fantasy in part, perhaps, but as anyone who remembers the cruel underbelly of adolescence can attest, events like the ones recorded here can be as much a part of the local school hallway culture as pinup pictures of movie stars. Rall's introduction memorializes a high school friend who chose suicide over responding with violence against his tormentors. Is there another way? Of course, but in real life, sometimes it is just plain impossible for kids to see that adolescence with all its evils isn't a permanent condition. Will this book speak to high school readers? Absolutely! But adults who have forgotten how gruesome those years can be also need to read it.
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This morbidly fascinating memoir-in-comics is one of the more frightening recollections of childhood bullying you're likely ever ever read. Rall grew up in the 1970s in Kettering, Ohio ("suburb of the damned"), a town of stunning homogeneity that concealed an undercurrent of absurd intolerance. An intelligent, "brown-haired, brown-eyed freak" with divorced parents and a French mother, Rall was routinely vilified by his unambitious, intellectual-hating classmates and relentlessly beaten and harassed by Brian, a strange and brutal kid he first encountered in junior high. Brian made Rall's life miserable for no discernible reason other than Rall's superficial social difference. Smaller than Brian and fearful of him, Rall was nevertheless equally cruel, devising indirect but gruesomely violent counterattacks. Rall's mother was powerless to stop these daily clashes, school officials were weirdly indifferent and the strange, primal conflict continued into high school. Puberty miraculously added eight inches and 12 pounds to Rall's frame, and he finally beat Brian into a bloody, senseless heap in the school hallway. Presented in Rall's angularly comic b&w drawings, the story alternates between a quirky poignancy and a thoughtful but bleak humor. With irony and introspection, Rall examines the effects of this bizarre experience on his development. He still often dreams of killing Brian but admits that "Brian made me stronger, but he also made me meaner, less trusting, hateful of hypermasculine men.... without him I might never have drawn cartoons, escaped Ohio or gotten laid."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Known for his acerbic political cartoons, Rall turns his caustic gaze inward in an autobiographical graphic novel about his misery in junior high in suburban Ohio. He was an alienated nerd, tormented by a loutish, psychotic bully who, for no apparent reason, chose Rall as his personal victim. Teachers and other adults refused to help Rall, leaving him to deal with Brian through violence that started out defensive but gradually turned sadistically vengeful. The escalating battle forced Rall into an ultimate assault that he then saw as the only way to prevent being marked as a victim for the rest of his life. Two decades later, a more introspective Rall ponders the lasting effect of Brian's harassment on his personality. To this day, Rall's behavior remains confrontational and defensive; he wonders whether his superior attitude prompted the bully's abuse. Rall's memoir is fueled by the bitterness and anger that inform his editorial cartoons and sports their vaguely cubist figures and distinctive scratchboard technique that makes them look like punk woodcuts. Gordon Flagg

Edition details

• Publisher: NBM Publishing
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1561632155
• ISBN 13: 9781561632152
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 60