Jeff Nicholson

"A magnificent piece of work." ― Dave Sim This collection of darkly humorous tales chronicles a nameless protagonist's struggle with a stultifying routine of office drudgery. The stories' Kafkaesque vignettes, portrayed in striking black-and-white drawings, offer eerie perspectives on the rigors of everyday life. Author Jeff Nicholson is best known as the creator of Ultra Klutz, Lost Laughter, Father & Son, and Colonia. Praised by comics artist and publisher Stephen R. Bissette as "one of the seminal graphic novels of the 1990s," Through the Habitrails features semi-autobiographical vignettes that include "Futile Love," "The Doomed One," "The Infiltrator," "The Dark Spiral," "The Gerbil King," and the "Escape" trilogy, one part of which was a 1993 Eisner Award nominee. Exclusive Bonus Material contains a new Epilogue, written and illustrated by the author, and a new Foreword by multiple Eisner Award winner Matt Fraction.

Life Before and After My Career in the Cubicles

Through the Habitrails

Gavin

God help an artist with a comfy white-collar job. It’s not that his suffering isn’t real, it’s not even that it’s necessarily much less intense than people with harder jobs, no jobs, back-breaking jobs, entirely abstract and zero-feedback jobs. But to write about the misery of your easy meaningless labour - even this well - without a moment of perspective is an artistic and spiritual failure. But it’s a great failure and I appreciate his heartlessness, narcissism, his latent Marxism foiled by apathy, his Romanticism scuttled by irony. It’s a logical tantrum, even when the gerbil king tells him to kill himself.

We hear no one but him; they are mute while he is unceasing. These stories are intended as horror without monsters (observe the lettering font he uses, or the mouthlessness or literal voicelessness of the characters). What would self-awareness cost him? His “being above this”, “being underemployed”, being an “(overproduced) elite” are not the only view of the arrangement, or even a very good one. 

  
All of the days should be mine.


Anyway aren’t corporate jobs dreadful. Nicholson comes up with my favourite ever image for the feeling of alienated work: resting to recover your “juice”, only to be stabbed the next day with multiple taps to drain it from you, a finite flow that also drives your personal projects. 

  
The company won two-thirds of my life, and drained the juices from my driven flesh for its own needless product.


The alcoholism chapter is very moving, very degraded.

The artist characters have no mouths; only the salespeople and the boss have them, big grins six inches tall.

  
A hatred was in her voice that would take a grip of your inner organs.



Anyway this is best in its class and even ends with acceptance(?)(?) of a 20 year career in Geographical Info Systems(?). Probably avoid if you’re currently in a shit job.

Abi Baker

If you were expecting to read something happy or comical, then you’re looking in the wrong place. This graphic novel is humorous in the darkest way, and may appeal to some and horrify others.

Through the Habitrails starts with an incredibly long introduction, a 13 page introduction by Stephen R. Bisette. Admittedly, I wanted to get through this before starting the actual content, to see if it could offer me some background about Habitrails, give me something a little extra, but I got about three pages in before I grew impatient. I wanted to read Nicholson's words, so I skipped it and went back to read it after I had finished.

This graphic novel is bleak, incredibly so. The black and white illustrations only add to the melancholic journey you take whilst reading. However although it’s bleak for the protagonist, it might also make you consider how good you may have things.
Sure, it's bad working conditions and a miserable life taken to the extreme (the humorous satirical nature is apparent, especially with the pickle jar filled with beer), but is it? Every reader will find something to relate to whilst reading this, and will feel at least an ounce of despair for the protagonist. I’m sure, like the unnamed protagonist, everyone has wanted to escape, or hasn’t identified with their peers before. 

Even though some of the imagery in this graphic novel (the illustrated, and that imagined from the writing) can be harrowing, Through the Habitrails is indeed compelling. I won't lie though, it was hard for me to get through and left me questioning a lot of things about the meaning of adulthood. Maybe because I'm younger than the protagonist and haven't had his experiences than I'm less jaded than him. The monotony of the protagonist's life, and how uses increasingly harmful ways (and how Nicholson uses increasingly fantastical methods) to cope with the mediocrity and stagnancy of his life are equal parts funny and disturbing. He’s definitely desperate for escape from his life though. 

Sometimes I too felt like the protagonist, as if I was reading this from outside my own body. I had to stop, go and do something else for five minutes, and then return to reading this in order to get through it. If you have depression, or have had harmful thoughts then I would probably advise against reading this. It isn’t all doom and gloom though, and we find the protagonist finally at some sort of peace at the end of Habitrails, and I too feel more at peace than I did at the start of the graphic novel. This truly is a testament to the work-life balance, albeit slightly more fantastical than most people portray theirs.

Yes, this graphic novel can be enjoyable, and over 20 years after it was published it still rings true, however it is also incredibly creepy. Not everyone will get it, but that’s okay.

Through the Habitrails Life Before and After My Career in the Cubicles

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