Review time! with ‘Be More Chill’

“I got a date with my tailor now, thanks for putting me so straight”

I knew when I got Be More Chill, which is published by Hyperion, that it was a YA comic. But that doesn’t really prejudice me against a book, and I dig Nick Bertozzi, who drew this, so I picked it up. It’s written by David Levithan, who adapted it from the novel by Ned Vizzini, who died in 2013 from what appeared to be suicide. He suffered from depression, which can really be hard to deal with.

It’s frustrating sometimes for me that I read a lot of things, because nothing feels new. Occasionally, I’ll gush about something simply because it’s novel, and that floats my boat. I still consume comics and books and television and movies, but one reason why I tend to lean toward non-fiction in books is because at least I’m learning something, and it’s usually something I don’t know too much about, or if I do know about it, I’m getting a different angle on it. Fiction is narrower, so when I read this book, for instance, despite its science fiction bent, I thought of Can’t Buy Me Love, the sweet and wonderful 1987 movie in which Patrick Dempsey wants to be cool, so he pays Amanda Peterson (R.I.P.) to hang out with for a little, thinking her epic coolness will rub off on him. Be More Chill features a nerdy dude who yearns to be cool and date a hot chick, but instead of paying a girl to hang out with him, he swallows a pill that has a super-computer inside it that tells him what to do. Soon, of course, he’s much cooler, wearing better clothes, knowing how to talk to girls, ditching his only friend because his friend is “uncool,” and generally being a self-centered douchebag. Will lessons be learned? Yes, lessons will be learned, mainly about embracing who you are. You know the drill.

The book is not quite as formulaic as it seems, and that’s definitely to its credit. Jeremy Heere (yes, the author makes a joke about it during attendance-taking) is a stereotypical nerd in many ways, but he’s also not completely socially helpless, which makes his decision to swallow the super-computer pill a bit more interesting. The sci-fi nature of the change means that Vizzini can introduce an element of danger, as the computer becomes more difficult to live with the longer it’s inside you. As we go on, the book turns more into a parable about the dangers of conformity, no matter what you conform to, either the “coolness” of the popular kids or even the nerdiness of Jeremy’s original personality. Both those elements are present in the climax of the book, where Jeremy decides to express his love for Christine, the girl he’s been crushing on. Vizzini and Levithan do something interesting with that relationship – Christine doesn’t just dismiss Jeremy in the beginning. She’s definitely not into him, and he’s a bit creepy about her (without her knowledge, it seems – he keeps it to himself), but she’s also willing to be his friend, but that’s not good enough for Jeremy. The friend/girlfriend divide has never sat well with me, but it’s still a good tack to take here, because it’s clear that Jeremy could have a shot with Christine if he were willing to be patient. He’s not, so he takes the shortcut. In the end, the book ends a bit weakly, but what’s a bit subversive about it is that Jeremy doesn’t seem to have learned the right lessons about what he went through. I’m not sure if that’s what Vizzini intended, but it feels like Jeremy is going to continue to pursue Christine, despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to want him to. The ending is vaguely dark, which might be me reading into it and might be what Vizzini wanted, and it makes the book a bit more unusual than your standard YA book.

Bertozzi’s art is, as usual, quite good. He uses only blue colors, which codes as “cool,” of course, so the vibe that Jeremy is “being more chill” is present throughout the book. He does a very nice job with Jeremy, as he changes the most in the book. He draws him early on slightly hunched, with a scraggly haircut and ill-fitting clothes. He also gets his shyness across and the way he lights up when he’s actually engaged, which helps make his decision to swallow the computer a bit more tragic, as Bertozzi shows that he’s not as socially awkward as he likes to think about himself. When Jeremy transforms from “nerd” to “cool,” Bertozzi does a good job showing how he changed and also how he’s still a nerd. He can’t change his essential personality, and while that comes through in the writing as well, Bertozzi does a lot to remind us visually that the “new” Jeremy is just a veneer. One of Bertozzi’s strengths is body language, and he shows the relationship between Jeremy and Christine well as they become closer over the course of the book before things take a turn. The anxieties of being a high schooler are hard to capture visually, but Bertozzi does a very good job with it. The people in the book might say things that fit with our version of “how nerds talk” or “how cool kids talk,” and Vizzini and Levithan lean into that, but without Bertozzi to add visual cues to their words, it would be a bit more difficult to make the dialogue work.

Despite a familiarity to it, Be More Chill has some interesting things to say. It’s a bit more clever than your run-of-the-mill high school story, as it ends up in a place where, on the surface, a lot of high school romance stories do, but with some subtle twists that make it linger with you a bit longer. Everyone wants to fit in, and with these stories, we usually see the cost of that, but this book doesn’t necessarily come down where we think it will. It’s not a great comic, but it’s still pretty good, which isn’t a bad thing. As usual, you can use the link below to get this or anything you want, and we’ll get a bit of money from it. So that’s neat!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆