2020
I assumed The Book Tour was a graphic memoir, but it turns out to be fiction, a true graphic novel. Sea of Tranquility also had a fictional book tour. Despite the indignities of travel and any sort of meeting with the public, the actual hardest part seems to be being separated from one's family.
The fictional author touring in The Book Tour is GH Fretwell, an absolutely luckless fellow. His tour is one day behind another author who's written an genuine blockbuster hit. Meanwhile no one attends Fretwell's signings or buys his book.
Also, someone's been kidnapping women, including the owner of the first bookstore on his tour, and the police seem to suspect him...
We alternate between hotel check-ins, disappointing calls home, empty signings, and run-ins with suspicious police as Fretwell's situation devolves to become more and more humiliating.
Watson's art is simple and sketch-like, with cartoony faces and realistic backgrounds of the various bookstores and cobblestoned European cities. The repetition with variations captures the nightmarish quality of the tour, and there's a good balance between humor and rising dread as his circumstances get worse and worse at each stop, building to an appropriately anticlimactic conclusion.
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