Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, graphic novel, username evie, X joe sugg, youtube, zoe sugg, zoella

Win A Copy Of Joe Sugg's Graphic Novel, Username: Evie

Joe Sugg is a YouTube author of some note, with the channels ThatcherJoeVlogs, ThatcherJoeGames and ThatcherJoe, the latter of which has five million subscribers and 340 million view of his challenges, pranks and impressions.

He's the younger brother of other YouTube sensation Zoe Sugg, better known as Zoella, so it's part of the family business. He was part of a Comic Relief YouTube boyband and appeared on the 2014 recording of Do They Know It's Christmas. He and his flatmate Caspar, also a YouTube star, played seagulls in The Spongebob Movie.

But that's so 2014…. What about 2015? Well, he's written a graphic novel with teenage agony aunt Matt Whyman, drawn by Amrit Birdi, coloured by Joaquin Pereyra and lettered by Mindy Lopkin.

Username: Evie. The book was published earlier this month in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton and is published today in the USA by Running Press Book Publishers.

The latter of who are giving away ten copies to American readers of Bleeding Cool. How do you get yours? Make sure you follow Bleeding Cool on Twitter and then retweet the tweet associated with this post once, between now and midnight ET. Tomorrow morning ten readers chosen at random will be DMed on Twitter for their details – and you then have 24 hours to respond or it will go to the next choice.

So what's Joe Sugg's graphic novel actually like?

It starts off very Buffy-Zombie-lite, our hero Evie facing down zombies, talking to the reader, phrasing everything in social media speak, before flashing back to her life before… well, before zombies really. The artwork fits into that as well, a fantasy world grounded in real life and not too far how you might imagine a talented teenager to be able to draw. It is rooted in that world, with a little extra colour pizazz. She suffers the first world problems of a relative outcast at a high school where even the bullying isn't actually that bad, even as everyone tries to model themselves on some kind of American high school experience from the TVs and movies that they just can't match up to, and trivial day to day aspects of life are blown up for effect. That a twenty minute school bus ride sees Evie complain to herself that she lives "some distance from school" will make most kids I know laugh their football socks off.

Look, it's got a thatched roof. Suggs spent a while as a roof thatcher, as everyone who watches his YouTube channel knows… write what you know?

Evie's problems at school pale against her actual problems, with a wheelchair bound dying father and no mother. But her greater concern is not being invited to a party and she exhibits all manner of activities that she justifies to herself as normal – but betray real psychological problems. No one clears out a fridge to get inside just to feel better without needing serious help.

But, you know, first world problems. And things are about to get a lot worse. Such as having to go and live with her cousin Mallory, one of the girls who psychologically bullies her at school.

No, sorry I meant zombies. Fending off a zombie invasion. Or something very much like them.

Because her father has left her a fully virtual alternative cyber experience, away from her school, away from her life, that she can live in. One that reflects who she is, completes her and gives her a place to be whole. One of peace and light and possibility. And one that is infected when the bully in question joins the experience and the world starts to reflect her instead. And everything starts to break, to rot, to turn.

It's a clear allegory for the internet, a place where awkward, isolated young people can find a community of like minded folk in which they just fit. Something that rewards what they put in, that doesn't judge, that gives support. But then the haters, the trolls come and destroy it, infect it and leave nasty messages in YouTube comments threatening rape or demanding suicide. Joe Sugg, a clear success on-line, has to deal with so much hate, it's not surprise that it would infect his otherwise positive experience of the world.

That's the reading that saves this book and transforms if from a sub-eighties American highs school drama into something closer to the nihilism of Black Mirror. It's a scream at humanity saying "this is what you do" – the power fantasy here isn't that such a place as E.Scape could exist, but that someone can stand up and stop it. The lesson of the book seems to be that the world is unsaveable and needs blowing up and starting over again. And somehow manages to portray that as a positive, desireable, light experience. It's really not a message I was expecting from the effervescent face of Sugg, basically recommending we turns everything off and on again, destroying and deleting everything that has ever been in the hope that we might do it better next time.

Nothing is fixed, nothing is saved, people grow (a little) but soon slip back into their lives. The only answer is to nuke it from space. It's the only way to be sure…

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