Lucky in Love: A Poor Man's History (Vol. 1)
This first graphic novel in a two-book series contains three chapters in the early life of Lucky Testatuda, who at the outset is a 15-year-old shrimp of a kid living in a 1942 Italian neighborhood of New Jersey. Whether he’s scheming with a pal on how to score some easy moola, tinkering with planes as a WWII air-force mechanic (quite possibly to disastrous results), or competing in the neighborhood greasy-pole contest, Lucky usually has one thing on his mind: dames and, more specifically, sex with them. He’s a bumbler who puts up a big front, and the night he finally scores is a timeless scramble of humiliation and exhiliration. DeStefano works in a sort of big-shoed, jaunty cartoon classicism that merrily channels Milt Gross here and Popeye there, though his fine work is sometimes overwhelmed by Chieffet’s Goodfellas-like voice-over narration. Teetering perilously close to becoming a no-good lush by the end, Lucky is nevertheless an endearing and petty hero, full of swagger and stumble but with one hell of a glint in his eye. --Ian Chipman