“Go down to the pub, play pool all day; put money in the record machine and let the jukebox play”
Open Bar is by Eduardo Medeiros and it’s published by Oni Press. That’s all there is to it, so let’s get going!
The book is about two friends, Leonard and Bernard (whose nickname is Beardo, because he has a beard) and what happens when they open a bar together. 
The title of the book is not a puzzle, people! Beardo inherits the bar from his dad, with whom he hadn’t had contact in some time, since his dad left his mom for another woman. The bar has fallen into disrepair, and the proviso in the will is that Beardo has to re-open it and run it for three years before he can sell it, or he gets nothing. Curiously, in the will, his dad says he can only take on one specific partner if he wants – Leonard. Beardo had already asked Leonard if he wanted to be his partner, so it all works out, but Beardo is a bit weirded out by his dad anticipating it. Beardo and Leonard already live together, but they’re both in dead-end jobs and they’re about to be evicted, so ownership of the bar – and the apartment above it – comes at a perfect time. They know nothing about running a business, but they dive right in!
There’s a lot going on in the book, and I’ll try not to spoil much. Leonard is separated from his wife, but he still loves her – she cheated on him, quite often, but he can’t give her up. Beardo keeps trying to tell him that she’s no good for him, but he can’t keep her out of his life, and she plays a big part in the story. They have no customers for a long time, as the bar is in a run-down part of town (one of their neighbors explains what has happened to the area, and it’s far too typical of what’s happening in cities), but one day, Beardo’s cousin shows up, and he’s a scientist working on something odd, and Beardo and Leonard use some of the things he’s doing to accidentally come up with a superb beer, which raises their profile. 
Then, a tragedy occurs right outside their door involving an airplane, and they become minor celebrities, which leads to more business. Their lives become entwined with the pilot’s, though, which isn’t always a good thing. As the book is about two regular people living regular lives, there’s some happy times and some sad times, and the book nicely ends with a mixture of both … just like real life, people!
Medeiros does a nice job with the characters – they feel like regular people, doing some stupid things and doing some cruel things, but always staying true to their personalities. Beardo and Leonard aren’t the smartest dudes and they’re definitely not great businessmen, but they learn through trial and error and work hard to make the bar a success. Even the publicity they get, which feels a bit like a deus ex machina, doesn’t feel too egregious, because luck does play a part in success, and they take advantage of it and also find out that success is a bit of a double-edged sword. Leonard’s feelings for his ex, Amanda, do feel a bit forced, because while she doesn’t seem like a horrible person, she did cheat on him a lot, and he just can’t let her go. It works out fairly well, but it’s a bit of an odd situation, mainly because we don’t really get to know Amanda as well as we do Beardo and Leonard. Medeiros gives us a lot about them and why they’re friends and how they stay friends, so we can even see why Leonard wouldn’t want to give up on Amanda, but her arc still feels a bit weaker than some of the other subplots in the book. One plot that Medeiros doesn’t really resolve is why Beardo’s dad is so interested in Leonard – he has the proviso in his will, and he even wrote a letter to Leonard before he died. Some people might be frustrated by the lack of answers about it, but it fits well with Medeiros’s realistic kind of story – Beardo’s dad is dead, he and his mother aren’t close and she probably wouldn’t have any answers anyway, and so that mystery is left unresolved, but part of the book is about letting go of your past, so the plot is less about what Beardo’s dad was thinking and more about Beardo coming to terms with the fact that it doesn’t really matter. 
A lot of the book is like that, and it works well because Medeiros isn’t too blatant about it.
Medeiros’s art isn’t spectacular, but it gets the job done. He keeps things blocky and basic, but that allows him to tweak small things – Leonard’s eyes when he’s drunk and/or high, for instance – for maximum effect. The entire book is colored in that burnt orange hue, but when he does flashbacks, the characters remain colored that way but the backgrounds are gray, allowing us to slip easily into them and back out without being confused. He generally keeps the lines clean (the colors roughen the artwork up a bit, which is cleverly done), and this means that toward the end, when something bad is happening, his rougher, thicker, and harsher lines have a huge effect on the tone of the book, hitting us much harder. Despite the “simplicity” of the character designs, Medeiros does a lot with small, short lines, and while the art is cartoonish, it certainly doesn’t lack in emotional impact when it needs to.
I know I like stories about regular people doing regular things, so I’m probably inclined to like this, but it is quite well done. Medeiros doesn’t go overboard trying to make any points, but he ends up making some anyway, which is how it should be done – let the lessons come out of the story organically, from what the characters do as they live their normal lives. This is just an interesting and compelling story about how we live and how we get over things, and it’s done quite well. That’s always keen!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
