John Mare DeMatteis's rambling biography of Vincent Carl Santini's senior year in high school has a lot more focus this time out than it did in the first volume, perhaps because we now know who he is and the writer can settle down to telling his story. That opening issue of four played surprisingly well as an introduction in hindsight, given that it took off in every direction all at once and had no staying power at any point. The closest it had to a story was a brief moment when he had a dog. A month later, however, all those random moments coalesced into a picture that stayed in place well enough for me to dive into a real story with grounding to give it depth.

That story is the traumatic arrest that was floated in book one but actually never happened there. We see less of Santini's parents and sister this time out, their influence having been replaced by a best friend called Shane. As he did last time out, Glenn Barr illustrates moments as they were with little attempt to keep a stylistic flow, so Shane initially appears cool and unflappable, someone a quiet young man like Santini feels drawn to follow, even when he has better things to do. This time, when Shane comes around asking if he wants to ride around, he really wants to watch 'The Ipcress File' but he goes along anyway, as always.

And, as we soon find, that simple decision underpins all the guilt that he feels about what it leads to, at the other end of a tortuous set of moments, decisions and circumstances. After all, Friday is the Kinks at the Fillmore East and they want to go strung out on mescaline, which in turn requires them to actually go and pick up the stuff from Bobby. But then they decide to get a soda from the Pizza Place. And there they meet Jackie the Junkie who needs a ride to get his heroin fix and he'll reward them with downers and, oh crap, there are the cops.

It's a great saga because Santini had regrets about even starting on this journey and the regrets soon grew into sinking feelings. There would have been a real inevitability to the way so many bad decisions stack up to a bad result even if DeMatteis hadn't been hammering home how awful it all was since halfway through the previous volume. The universe was clearly aligning in a particularly poor way for our protagonist and it's probably safe to say that most of us can look far back into our pasts and find something equivalent. Why did we do something that stupid? Well, it started here and then this happened and so and so said that and a string of dumb decisions later, we ended up doing something that we can't believe we would ever have done, even though we did.

Of course, DeMatteis doesn't just tell this story in a nice clean linear fashion. He dips and dives all over the place like Muhammad Ali on the ropes and, by the time he's done, he's told a dozen other stories on the way. There isn't as much of Dominick and Esther Santini here, but they're still there and some of their scenes represent pivotal life moments, even if they didn't happen during senior year. For instance, we get the story of Dominick's death here and how Vincent Carl had to identify him, but that doesn't happen until 1984, so it's well into the future from the core of this story.

Esther's best moment—at least from a dramatic standpoint, because I find that I tend to judge the book while reading it on Barr's art rather than DeMatteis's story, which will gradually focus later—is the moment she realises that her son's on drugs. The future narrator version of Santini is clean and alive and healthy, so he makes it through whatever happens over these four volumes, but he's on a whole slew of them in senior year: amphetamines, dexedrine, mescaline, you name it, but no serious stuff. He's not Jackie the Junkie.

It's worth mentioning, I think, that Santini at the age when he's tasked with identifying his father has a mild resemblance to Lemmy from Motörhead. That reminded me that he always claimed to have been kicked out of Hawkwind for doing the wrong drugs. He was on speed. They were on LSD and mescaline. And the moment that happened, at the Canadian border, isn't entirely dissimilar to Santini's arrest story, given that both were charged with possession. I wonder if that served as an influence on DeMatteis or whether I'm just assuming all old hippies look alike.

Back to Esther's story, though, because DeMatteis's rambling approach is rubbing off on me. Barr draws her not only as the gesticulating neurotic caricature he'd used in the first book but also in a particularly striking panel as a hoarder of secrets. She's sat on the floor in an imaginary room, an abundance of filing cabinets stacked around her, grinning as she holds onto a sizeable jar labelled "deepest darkest most shameful secrets". Of course, that shifts to narrator Santini firmly back in Rod Serling mode with that jar on a pedestal pondering on the philosophy of it.

I liked this volume better than its predecessor. It does much the same thing in much the same way but it's more focused and I think Barr gets even more opportunity to interpret the memories that DeMatteis threw at him. My favourite aspect of the book is how he can move from this style to the next on the very same page with a couple more in-store for the panels at the bottom. Yet, it's all a coherent vision that plays true to the core of truth within Santini's inherently flawed attempts at autobiography.

So to book three. Let's see how whether there's a central story there to focus on. I'm also starting to wonder where it's all going to end up. The first book built towards the arrest. That's now done. Next up is the aftermath. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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