The Tragical Comedy Or Comical Tragedy Of Mr. Punch: A Romance

"The path of memory is neither straight nor safe, and we travel down it at our own risk. It is easier to take short journeys into the past, remembering in miniature, constructing tiny puppet plays in our heads. That's the way to do it."

"That's the way to do it" has an eerie ring in this graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. When Mr. Punch kills the beadle, he yells out "at'sthewaytodoit!" The puppet show is damn eerie manz. Mr. Punch throws his baby out of the window, cudgels his wife to death, and even kills the devil himself.

Mr. Punch is about how we form our childhood memories. The narrator remembers his childhood in bits and pieces that don't make sense. He remembers a heart ice-lolly that costs a shilling, the feeling of a crocodile puppet coming to life, the reassuring bulk of his grandmother on a stormy night, the colour of the sea, but like Humpty Dumpty, he can't fit the pieces together to make it make sense.

This shroud of incomprehensibility is aided by the dark and shadowy background McKean uses. The only characters that are composed from real elements are the puppets, making them seem larger than life in the memory of the narrator. Real life gets interwoven with the puppet show, and both are infected with fantasy. How else do you fit a naked mermaid sitting on a rock in a run-down amusement park?

An excellent review here.