Black Hat Blues in Review / Write / Read Club (Indie & Self-Published)

Aug 08, 2022 Ann Birdgenaw rated it really liked it

4.5 STARS
Art imitates life or life imitates art? This is the entertaining premise in Black Hat Blues by Gene Kendall. Cartoonist, Mark Lipscomb creates a popular comic strip in the 1970s including an alter-ego, supervillain Mr. Scratch, who, quite literally ‘leaps off the page’ and into the creators’ later life. What could go wrong?! Is Mark going senile in his retirement years or is his entire family in danger? The smooth writing and humor will immerse you in this unique combination of real-lif ...more

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Mar 15, 2019 Nathan rated it really liked it

A must-read for comic book fans

Comic book fans should check out Black Hat Blues. It offers an original, inventive take on the genre. It celebrates and tweaks the tropes of comic book writing to create a book that is both respectful to what has come before and thoroughly its own.

Kendall has an ability to create characters who are expressive and distinct. Throughout the book, his unique comedic voice shines through for a very enjoyable read.

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Sep 01, 2022 P.L. Tavormina rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fun

There’s something about an intelligent author where they take a simple situation, say two strangers passing on the street, and they make it amusing. I felt that zingy, funny voice before the bottom of page one of Black Hat Blues, found myself sucked in.

We quickly zip around to new characters and places (the head of a supernatural character, suburban Pittsburgh with Everyday Americans, elsewhere) and yet it’s not confusing, because the voice here is so light and fun. This story is a ride, man, w ...more

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May 29, 2019 Rik Ty rated it it was amazing

Are you a Genre Fan? Then YES, you should read this novel. And YES, you should follow this author. Black Hat Blues is a satirical story about a comic-book super-villain who has to take a mystical trip through the dimensions when his teleporter breaks. He winds up in an alternate reality, one where not only has his whole life been a comic-book fiction, but he’s in the timeline, AND the locale, where the creator of the comic book lives. They’re in close proximity to each other. He winds up eating ...more

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Jul 27, 2019 Ben Haskett rated it really liked it

Shelves: i-read-this-on-my-kindle, self-pub, rrs, 2019-reads, published-201x

Black Hat Blues is a delightful, bizarre, and sometimes disturbing novel where an aging comics writer finds himself face-to-face with the most vile comic book character he's ever created. I mean this literally; one minute Mark Lipscomb is taking out his garbage, and the next, he's drinking tea with Mr. Scratch, his classic comic book's dastardly villain. And though the author seems to channel Stephen King's Mort Rainey at first (in fact, there are many scenes where Mark administers tests to chec Black Hat Blues is a delightful, bizarre, and sometimes disturbing novel where an aging comics writer finds himself face-to-face with the most vile comic book character he's ever created. I mean this literally; one minute Mark Lipscomb is taking out his garbage, and the next, he's drinking tea with Mr. Scratch, his classic comic book's dastardly villain. And though the author seems to channel Stephen King's Mort Rainey at first (in fact, there are many scenes where Mark administers tests to check if Scratch is really there), by the end I was reminded more of Mike Anderson from SK's Obits.

I really liked Mark. He was charming, he had values, and he believed in the work he did. One of the most tragic scenes had Mark in a college auditorium giving some sort of off-brand Ted talk about his comics. One after another, he was shown creations he seemed to have forgotten about — especially those that didn't age as well as others. You know the sort of thing I mean. If I may invoke Stephen King's work a third time: they don't play Green Mile on TV anymore.

Even worse, though, Mark is forced to remove his rose-colored glasses and look at his Saturday-morning cartoons through a much more cynical lens. It was almost a relief when the college protesters burst through the doors and ended the talk early.

Almost all of the characters, even Scratch (though his outlook on life was especially hard to stomach at times), were well developed and mostly consistent throughout.

There were three things in Black Hat Blues that rubbed me the wrong way. The first was the politics. Juxtaposed to the aforementioned real-seeming characters, all the politicians and college protesters came off like one-note SNL skit characters. It's funny that some of the pretend characters had less life in them than the pretend characters created by other pretend characters.

The second was a scene that I had to Google to see if it existed, and was disappointed to find that it did. One of the characters feels wronged by another and decides to play a horrible prank. Spoilers for the rest of this paragraph: (view spoiler).

Third, and this is minor, the ending sorta jumped the shark for me. I don't know what I was expecting, but it was definitely not that.

Anyway, these are minor things; Black Hat Blues is a great book with a ton of well-written characters and a very creative plot. Highly recommended. ...more

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Feb 22, 2021 Ed Morawski rated it liked it

The story is told with a good measure of dry wit and humor – which to tell the truth kept me going long after I normally would have put it down. The issue is that I felt like I came in during the middle of the movie and never quite completely figured out what was going on until ‘Part 1’ – about forty pages in and then only barely.

There’s a strange guy lost in another dimension, an old guy writing a comic book, and his characters (I think). Maybe because I was never a fan of comic books (sorry – ...more

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Feb 16, 2019 Gene Kendall added it · (Review from the author)

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May 25, 2023 Lynn Helton added it · review of another edition

Shelves: speculative-fiction, contemporary, read-but-no-reciprocal-reviewing

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