by Andrew Vachss and Frank Caruso
Dark Horse Books, $24.99, 100 pages
Heart Transplant is written by three amazingly wired-in individual artists; all three bringing their own unique talent to this heart-wrenching project. Written in a first-person account from a kid who lives with his alcoholic father, the story begins relaying the plight of every teenager, the understood and cliché classes, who belongs and who doesn’t. His father attempts to teach him life-lessons in his own way; not in the normal way a stable parent would do but unique to his own abilities and experiences. It’s not until his father dies that he realizes how much his father did love him and sacrifice for him taking a beating to build confidence in his son. Touching, poignant story that would grab any teens’ attention from the first sentence and dark sketch-style drawings. The book does well in enticing its readers to finish the story to completion; it compels the viewer to want to know what happens next to this deprived young man and who, in the end finds real love, confidence and inner strength that wasn’t there before.