I Blame Grandma by Joe Decie

A SLY humour woven into a touching and absorbing memoir of his grandmother, I Blame Grandma by Joe Decie is an astounding accomplishment given that it was competed in less than 24 hours at this year's Lakes Comic Art Festival. 

Like the rest of the 24 hour crew from that year, the level of craft on show here is impressive, but as with each of his contemporaries, Decie has an individual style which stamps him as unique. 

Setting his stall out from page one ("My grandmother invented the paper clip"), Decie weaves an intriguing narrative, just strange enough to be true.

His wonderfully observed artwork has the look of faded photographs, the dreamy watercolours blurring at the edges like soft focus backgrounds, adding a hint of realism and retreating memory to his story (and setting us up neatly for his punchline).

His scenery, while fluid enough to let us fill in the gaps ourselves, feels keenly observed, and I'm left wondering whether he used references (and enviously betting he didn't). 

Decie has a number of storytelling tricks up his sleeve to dazzle us with here, and he employs them all to add emphasis to the beats in his tale, and in retrospect, maybe to lull us into a false sense of security. 

A lovely two panel shot of his his Grandma Dot's co-workers is repeated later in the book, effectively book-ending her which 15 minutes of fame, with the latter panel showing how quickly her innovation and fame were forgotten. 

Decie repeats the same theme of the fleeting nature of fame as he takes the story into his second stage, describing how he and his brother spent their inheritance, with the wry narration hinting at a little good-natured bitterness ("I was a sixteen year old with a mullet ... And a million pounds ... What were they thinking?") that is reflected in the book's title. 

Again, like Dot, a young Decie is famous for a hiccup, fading into obscurity for reasons his young brash brain can't figure out ("There were charts explaining this"), while his more successful brother, whose investments paid off, is enjoying the proceeds still.

Throughout I Blame Grandma, Decie's narrative wanders absent-mindedly off on tangents.

At one point he starts to tell us about a favourite local Thai restaurant, using a gorgeous bit of repetition again by inverting a panel showing Dot's hands working away at creating thousands of paper clips to aid the war effort, across a two-page spread to create a second mirrored image of the Thai chef chopping vegetables for a Massaman curry. 

Later Decie suddenly recalls his coat hanging on the line and a lingering camera zooms in on a clothes peg - perhaps reminding us of another invention whose creator (maybe a woman named Peg during the war?) remains uncredited and unappreciated.

At first I attributed these tangents as a product of the 24 hour comics process, where, inevitably, your mind would wander, to food, forgotten laundry and other things.

But having reached the ending of the book and had the rug suddenly whipped out from under me, I can't help but wonder whether this was Decie's design all along, a little sleight of hands perhaps to distract us and to accentuate the revelations about our narrator laid bare in those final panels. 

I Blame Grandma is the calling card of a talented comics creator and a very accomplished writer, with tricks up his sleeve aplenty and a wry, dry sense of humour that's warm and pleasant to read. 

You can buy a copy of I Blame Grandma at http://joedecie.bigcartel.com and you can find Joe @JoeDecie, joedecie.tumblr.com and at www.joedecie.com