Life with Mr. Dangerous

Life with Mr. Dangerous is a moving, muted portrait of someone caught in isolation and rumination. The dialogue is pitch perfect, and the images capture the powerful psychodynamic processes by which Amy manages to pull herself out of a funk and start living again.  This comic demonstrates beautifully how words and images can work together to articulate the inarticulable and represent the symbolic processes preceding and undergirding narrative. –S. Squier

Life with Mr. Dangerous is a formal experiment can sometimes take the ordinary or mundane to great heights.  Paul Hornschemeier’sLife With Mr. Dangerous is fantastic proof. On the surface Life With Mr. Dangerous is an examination of a young woman at a rather unhappy point in her life.  She is unsatisfied with her work, her love life, and her relationships with family and friends.  This is certainly not a new topic for a comic (or any other narrative).  But Hornschemeier uses the comic form so expressively and uniquely as to unwrap Amy’s life using incredible comic technique, forcing the reader to not just glaze over the simplicity of Amy’s unhappiness.  This is a brilliant use of artistic comic form. –J. Secreto

In the tradition of the ennui-enveloped world of Tomine and Clowes, Paul Hornshemeier (PH) adds another to the long list.  PH’s drawings capture well the two dimensional “blankness” of her life, accepting the little that comes into it and the little she puts out.  Echoing her existence is a television show that serves as a minor Greek chorus that comments upon her life.  But the landscape is not as bleak as it could be.  PH does hint at happier times in the near future for our surviving heroine. 
–G. Masuchika