Amazon Exclusive Brain Hanging

Last week’s lively debate at Comics Comics over the merits of David Heatley’s MY BRAIN IS HANGING UPSIDE DOWN has drawn a point-by-point response from Heatley himself.

First off, I’m really proud of this book. I spent almost five years on it. It’s not perfect by any stretch and I’m sure it will be a maddening read for some people, but it’s my baby and I stand behind it. I think of it as a catalog or a ledger accounting book. It’s an inventory of my life. It doesn’t have a traditional novelistic arc to it. It doesn’t follow the rules of usual literature and might not look like your run-of-the-mill comic book.

My Brain is a series of fractured vignettes that approximate a self-portrait, clearly incomplete— a record of who I was and what mattered to me most while writing it. More than that, it’s the best way I know to talk about my country. There’s an amazing amount of personal and cultural baggage I was bombarded with as a kid and teenager and it’s my job to sort it out and make sense of it and decide what’s worth keeping (and passing on). The risk I took was in betting that readers would find that process entertaining or moving or helpful in some way. It seems the jury’s still out, over here at least.


The rebuttal to the rebuttal continues in the comments.

Related: Heatley relates other reactions to his book in a comic strip at Amazon, excerpted above.

1 COMMENT

  1. He definitely is quite a skilled craftsman. Look at the quality of his pen line, I can also tell he’s put in years and years of studying anatomy, and fine tuning his storytelling technique. I see the influence of Foster, Raymond, and Caniff. His dynamic camera angles and pacing certainly owe a “tip of the hat” to Eisner. Beautiful work! I’m sure decades from now, students from around the world will be studying his work. The circle will be complete. Pure genius!