To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Luke Healy's playful, hilarious third graphic novel uses crisp lines and physical comedy to portray an uneasy friendship between two young men on the cusp of adulting. I greatly disliked the character of Giorgio and wished there was more closure for the reader on their relationship.

Healy is one of those very noticing artists, and the great pleasure of his deeply satisfying fourth book, which is about an old friendship that will shortly curdle, lies in small things: little details you may not notice the first time around; ambiguities that nag away at you. Healy's strikingly simple black/white/grey line-drawn panels belie a complex examination of the eponymous con artists, clouded by self-delusion, enabled by social media. Pretty brutal Goodreads average here for what I deem well done comics, sort of minimal, with barely tolerable main characters who are essentially conning each other in different ways.A lot of the story made me feel uncomfortable, which isn't a bad thing in a story about a toxic relationship and dealing with mental health issues. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Along the way, he discovers Giorgio has been living a life not parallel to that he depicts on social media, and is committing fraud to pay bills. The Con Artists is a stylish character study that asks the question of who fools who once everyone is off-camera. Healy opens this with a section declaring this as TOTALLY FICTION, NOTHING to do with ME and then interrupts the story half way to take a break and reassert that this is TOTALLY fiction, so that is funny.

But I never found myself much caring about what happened to anyone - and I particularly didn't care for the higher concepts Luke Healy seemed determined to introduce. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it, but I did want a little more happening on a visual and emotionally expressive level. I also enjoyed witnessing Frank and Giorgio's dynamic which felt like an accurate portrayal of how people like Frank are manipulated by people like Giorgio. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report.What might have initially been funny on a first read becomes poignant in its failed earnestness, and then depressing and disturbing when the lines are repeated before various audiences throughout the course of the comic.