Happyface (review)

His IM name is CartoonBoy and he's kind of emo, but when the girl he's crushing on breaks his heart, his parents split, and his mom moves him to a crappy apartment in a new town, things change. Dubbed "Happyface" by a hot girl in his new school, he decides to roll with it, and he becomes who his new friends want him to be—someone who keeps things light and makes them laugh, not someone who might be sitting in the corner drawing and fantasizing about girls he'll never talk to. Things start to go well—he's got a seat at the popular table, and a decent chance, he thinks anyway, with Gretchen, the girl who gave him his new moniker. His new friends can't help digging up the dirt from his old life, however, and his Happyface mask gets put to the test. The multi-genre journal format is particularly successful here, with illustrations that range from witty cartoons to cute caricatures to beautiful portraits, comics that offer compelling commentary on the struggles suffered by a shy, sensitive guy in high school, and email and IM printouts that provide context for Happyface's emotional states. Much emotion is conveyed through the art, which is both complementary and supplementary to the journal entries, arresting in its own right and meaningful above and beyond the text. As a character, Happyface emerges as dorky but not pathetic, awkward but not hopeless, and ultimately sympathetic and genuinely likable. As his story unfolds and his life unravels, he gains wise but credible insight into both the predictable drawbacks and the surprising benefits of wearing a mask in interpersonal relationships, and he eventually finds the hard-won grace of self-forgiveness.