You'll Never Know: A Graphic Memoir back

"World War Two. A catastrophic 6-year-long global wave of aggression instigated by delusional, charismatic criminal leaders intent on incurring death, destruction and domination over nations, cultures and individuals through the use of bombs, guns, tanks, explosives and poison. You would never know that he had participated in it."

An honest look into a very ordinary man's war experience, and the possible consequences it might have had on his relationship with his family. C Tyler's father wasn't a frontline infantryman, in fact he was a plumber by trade and was soon put to good use in an engineering capacity helping ensure everything from jeeps and tanks right down to the camp showers kept running. Aside from several allusions to a gruesome encounter which took place in Italy (presumably all will be explained in volume two) he seems to have had quite an entertaining and reasonably enjoyable wartime service, including finding time to woo and marry his wife.

Which makes it all the stranger that C Tyler seems convinced her father's distant manner with her, completely at odds with his still publicly affectionate and sweetly romantic relationship with his wife, was down to his war experiences that he never spoke about. Until at last after many years of refusing to talk about it, and having only had an unmarked photo album to try and draw clues from in all that time, he agrees to let her interview him about his wartime service. These portions of the book I really enjoyed, but I just found the sequences where C Tyler focuses on herself and her problems slightly grating for their slight woe-is-me tone rather than them being the informative emotional counterpoint I'm sure they were intended as.

But don't let that put you off, because it is actually interesting to see how self-absorbed and deluded someone can be as to why their marriage has actually fallen apart, rather than displaying any self-awareness at all about why they find themselves in the situation they are in.

Nice touch to make several of the backgrounds and the book itself reminiscent of a photo album, and I am looking forward to volume two to find out what on earth happened in Italy.