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Loading... Memoirs of a Man in Pajamas (2021)by Paco Roca
None No current Talk conversations about this book.  villemezbrown | Jan 14, 2024 |  no reviews | add a review
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At 40, cartoonist Paco Roca has finally achieved his childhood dream - to spend all day at home in his pajamas! However, his blissful, loungewear-clad reverie is beset with a host of mundane problems: He dreads small talk with "the world's biggest bore," but his excuses and white lies are finally catching up with him. When good friends breaks up, taking either side could lead to social disaster. The simple mission to change his train ticket descends into an impossibly complicated, Kafkaesque affair. And worst of all, his partner keeps hanging the toilet paper roll the wrong way! In the vein of sitcoms like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Roca's comic vignettes brilliantly satirize the pesky pitfalls of modern-day life. Like most of us, Roca's alter ego just wants to be liked and to do the right thing, but finds that through crippling indecision, cowardly behavior, and the absurd machinations of the universe, he is usually thwarted. The ensuing situations he finds himself embroiled in are as hilarious as they are often painfully relatable. No library descriptions found. |
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Wikipedia in English
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The first section, from Memorias de un hombre en pijama, are all one-page strips with lots of jokes about dating, being a cartoonist, and working from home -- or rather, wandering around one's apartment while procrastinating. Each page is pretty dense, usually with 12 panels, setting up and paying off what are pretty mild or cliched gags, including some about running out of ideas for the strip, which was apparently appearing in some periodical in Spain.
The second section, from Andanzas de un hombre en pijama, revives the strip with a 12-page time-travel epic before settling back into 2-page gags -- now with nine panels per page -- about being a cartoonist and family man. It gets a bit meta at one point as it examines the many ways Roca's avatar in the strip -- the "man in pajamas" of the title -- is a fiction.
The third section, from Confesiones de un hombre en pijama, bookends 2-page strips with a couple longer stories. Having used up so much the slice-of-life material, Roca gets political, creating essays about economics, colonialism, anti-capitalism, and universal healthcare.
None of the above is bad, but it didn't do much to stand out in a field crowded with graphic memoirs about cartoonists and their home life. Being set in Spain didn't bring as much of a new slant as I thought it would. And Roca's tendency to include dozens of celebrity cameos -- Groucho Marx, Superman, the Pink Panther, Alfred Hitchcock, etc. -- didn't actually do much to enliven the pages.
FOR REFERENCE:
Collects three volumes of the Memoirs of a Man in Pajamas series: Memorias de un hombre en pijama (2011), Andanzas de un hombre en pijama (2014), and Confesiones de un hombre en pijama (2017). (