HAPPY ENDING

HAPPY ENDING

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

HAPPY ENDING is the story of a girl named Hope, a young runaway, roped into a life of prostitution. Narrated first by a houseboy of the brothel where they both live and work. Then later narrated by Hope herself, who has big dreams. A simple story told in the not so simple form of a 528-page experimental graphic novel or art comic by author and artist Joy Rip.

The book is divided into three parts. PART 1 is the Foreword and contains the first Dream. PART 2 contains the Chapters 1-10 of the main story. PART 3 is the Afterword and contains the final Dream. Enjoy! Come dream with us.

Hope's dream house & fear's haunted house.

HOPE'S DREAM HOUSE AMIDSTS FEAR'S HAUNTED HOUSES. Though Joy Rip's stories are haunting, they are not typical ghost stories in that they do not draw on the supernatural (in the ordinary sense) for their power.

Instead, the so-called natural world's unfathomable super-reality is exposed in all its natural otherness and unnatural otherworldliness.

Joy Rip redefines the ghost story by exposing the unnaturalness of the natural. The unnaturalness of how we naturally take everything about the singular phenomenon of being alive for granted. How the day-to-day rarely reveals ordinary life to be extraordinary. And how amazing, how extraordinary is this natural blindness that allows us to carry on like everything is all right.

These books are an effort to reverse that natural order and rediscover the hauntingly magical in the impossibly mundane.

And nothing is more magical than stumbling across the unexpectedly real and important in the inexplicable unreality and unimportance that overwhelms and dominates the day-to-day.

Is life important? Is my life important? Is my sense of importance real? If not, how can anything, anyone feel real? How can any feeling not be a delusion? How can any belief based on this sense of importance, based on these feelings be trusted?

Unearth the true nature of the real and important! There is no greater treasure hunt. No greater supernatural. No greater escape from the banal's house of horrors.

"The reality of consciousness is captured best as a ghost story... An endless ghost story. Consciousness is a veil. We are all haunted by an absence of presence. Conscious reality is never fleshed out to its full depth. Everyone is a silhouette accented by shadows. Everything is unsatisfyingly fragmented, fleeting, shallow. Everything is a partial truth at best. Everyone is a great unknown. Nothing is truly substantial in our knowledge of ourselves and one another. We sleep, glide through life. Dreaming we are awake. We are ghosts."

~ Joy Rip

"Happy Ending" Review

Grady Harp (LA, CA): Amazon's Top Reviewer of the arts reviews Joy Rip's graphic novel Happy Ending.

"... an invitation for thinking stimulated by a different level of combining the visual with the written word."

See Review