Kill Your Boyfriend, pgs. 47-48 (1995)

Two 11x17 sequential pages from Grant Morrison, Phillip Bond, and Disraeli's 1995 Vertigo one-shot, Kill Your Boyfriend.

I ate up almost everything Vertigo in the mid-90s and a big part of that was writers like Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, and Grant Morrison. I’ve always gravitated to Morrison more than the other two writers, largely because of the off-kilter one-off projects he wrote when he wasn’t concentrating on the Invisibles and other DC books.

Kill Your Boyfriend was one of those projects. It’s one of those books that defies simple description but attitude, anarchy, and art are good keywords to start with.

Philip Bond also has a lot to do with me reading and re-reading this book over the years. I gravitate to cartoonists who can move between cartoonish-ness and realism and Bond definitely fits in that category. Needless to say, I loved his art as much as I loved Morrison’s story so I’m thrilled to add this two-page sequence from the book to my collection.

If you need a plot synopsis for KYB, the one on Wikipedia will do as good as any:

“The story is a darkly comic satire of British youth culture which revolves around a bookish middle class schoolgirl, who has a bland unexciting life until she meets a strange young boy who convinces her to kill her boyfriend. They then go on the run together for a series of anarchic adventures across Britain. Meeting up with a group of travellers in a double-decker bus, the pair indulge in more crime and sexual experimentation before making their way to Blackpool to meet their final fate.”

Sign me up.