by L.A. Mood Comics and Games

By Dan Brown.

If you’re a child of the 1970s, you’re going to love D. Boyd’s Denniveniquity.

This new graphic memoir covers the years 1977 to 1980 in the comic creator’s life growing up in Saint John.

Boyd, now a Montrealer, captures the Me Decade better than any other artist, on par with filmmaker Richard Linklater – the guy who directed Dazed and Confused.

The book begins when button-nosed Dawn is in Grade 7.

She has a crush on movie star Gene Wilder and has seen Star Wars three times. Her favourite band is Trooper. 

Boys like to grab her developing breasts – “WONKA WONKA!!” one yells as he assaults her in the school hallway. Her mother is relentlessly negative. “You’re too young to look so matronly,” she chides. “Boys are only going to want one thing from you.”

The book follows Dawn as she navigates each new grade. 

There are moments of glee, as when classmate Robbie Allen calls her on the phone at home. And moments of frustration: “Isn’t there anything I’m good at?” she wonders after failing to master downhill skiing.

Denniveniquity rewards close reading. Each panel is carefully crafted to reinforce the feel of the era in which Dawn grows up.

If, like me, the first full decade you lived through was the 1970s, this book is going to be a thrill. 

Boyd packs each panel with detail. There’s an April Wine T-shirt. A scene at a Trooper concert (there’s also a discussion of the proper way to pronounce lead singer Ra McGuire’s first name). Keen-eyed readers will also spot a reference to Meco’s galactic funk on the back of a newspaper page. 

Farrah Fawcett-Majors gets a mention, as do TV shows like Soap and Grizzly Adams, and the Hamilton band Teenage Head.

It was the decade of faux wood panelling on station wagons, Participaction, KMart, Joe Clark, Jimmy Carter, the Amityville Horror, and Fotonovels.

In one explosive splash panel, as the New Year’s countdown approaches and 1980 beckons, Dawn sees the pop culture of her childhood flash before her eyes. “Wow, the ’70s are over,” she marvels. “That was most of my childhood.”

And, of course, Dawn gets drunk for the first time by invading her parents’ liquor cabinet in the basement bar. Nor can her young mind understand the unwritten rules of friendship and dating. “Whatever I like about him seems to be the same thing I hate about him,” she says of her on-again, off-again boyfriend Nick.

But more than getting the specifics of the 1970s in Canada right, Denniveniquity nails the sensation of how time passes for a young person.

Boyd pulls this off by omitting clunky transitions, just as the developing brain does. She glides effortlessly from one scene to the next, and the reader never feels something is missing. It all makes sense.

The only other comic creator who was able to do the same as masterfully is Gilbert Hernandez with his childhood recollections in Marble Season.

Denniveniquity covers some of the same ground as Boyd’s 2019 book Chicken Rising, but don’t let that deter you. It is also published by the East Coast’s Conundrum Press. 

I give it my highest recommendation. 

This book belongs in the same conversation as Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer, Michel Rabagliati’s Paul Moves Out, and Seth’s ongoing Nothing Lasts in Palookaville. 

With Jeff Lemire’s new autobiography looming in July, this is shaping up to be a landmark year for graphic memoirs by Canadian comic creators!

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.