Your Place In The World Review

Your Place In The World is a graphic short story/essay by Robert J. Hudecek. It is billing itself as the first thinking man's "coffee shop comic," as it is dark, dirty, and does its best to either drive you to an untimely death or to join a fight club. Being a short story with no interactive qualities, the main focus on the review has to be from a literary standpoint, and in my opinion, things look pretty bleak.

Remember that scene in Good Will Hunting in the bar where the Harvard guy with the blonde ponytail regurgitates a bunch of schoolbook knowledge to Matt Damon and he not only calls him out on it, but tells him how dumb he sounds for saying it? That's kind of how I feel here. Your Place In The World may have been made with a ton of thought, and maybe the rambling nature came from years of pain and neglect, but it comes off as regurgitated anger. Everything said in the essay has been said in so many different formats it's not even funny. Brad Pitt gave a similar speech about Edward Norton's lust for useless ideals in Fight Club, Keanu Reaves said all the same stuff in A Scanner Darkly, and countless Xanga and LiveJournal pages back in the early 2000's were written in the same style. I get it, the world is fake and we are all numb to everything. It's not an intelectual topic anymore, it just comes off as adolescent and emo.

On the bright side, though, the essay is livened up by some wonderfully ironic pictures of fake looking people and mannequins with out of place scribbles and dollar signs for eyeballs. The art almost seems like a cross of the opening scene in Nip/Tuck and Eyes Wide Shut, and I think that's a good thing.

If you are considering purchasing Your Place In The World, just know that it's pretty, but the entire essay should be the intro to something much more powerful or should be used as a monologue in a movie best acted by Keanu Reaves. It's dark, it's brutish, and it's all been done before.