‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’, a graphic novel, by Paul B. Rainey    (2023) – 214 pages

Here is a graphic novel that depicts a miserable marriage and the resultant bad parenting in horrific detail. We have married couple Mark Hopkins and his wife Claire and their two children Charley and Sally.

Claire spends much of her days in bed, is depressed, and drinks too much. Mark, after spending months on sick leave from his job as a web manager due to his own severe depression, finally must return to work at the office. Both parents try to avoid their little children as much as possible by letting them watch TV or play with their Xboxes all the time. The parents resent it when their children’s sickness or a birthday party intrude on their time. Mark can’t even remember his son Charley’s name most of the time.

Then Claire has a quickie affair with her friend Esther’s husband, and her son Charley sees his mother’s lover as le leaves their house. Claire says to her son “You naughty boy! I thought I told you to stay in your room!”

The first half of ‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’ paints a grim picture of a terribly unhappy marriage and severely dysfunctional parenting. Each page of this graphic novel is a separate entry as would be a serial comic strip. Mark and Claire are such a miserable couple and such lousy parents, their situation is almost laughable, almost.

About half way through ‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’, there is a sudden unexpected twist and Mark and Claire are leading entirely different separate lives apart from each other. Mark is a barber and Claire has a job answering technical questions on the phone. She lives with a another man.

At one point, Claire actually writes to her grown-up son Charley,

“At best, Mark and I were negligent. Other times I was cruel. Especially to you.”

For me, the author needed a much better, earlier explanation of this big switch, the unexpected twist, that occurred. In the absence of this explanation, the reader is left hanging with the impression that this story is severely disjointed and contrived. Thus I cannot rate ‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’ very highly.

Later there is some science fiction claptrap about “parallel universes” theory to explain the sudden drastic changes. To me, this explanation was too late and insufficient.

‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’ is published by the graphic novel publisher Drawn & Quarterly whose works I usually rate much more highly.

Grade:    B-