A social justice commentary about Venice Beach disguised as a murder mystery. Eddie is a homeless person with mental and addiction issues. He comes across the body of a young homeless woman he knew and decides to figure out who did it. Not through any smarts of his own but happenstance and pure luck. However, what this is really about is Joshua Dysart doesn't like how Venice Beach is changing. Apparently Snapchat has moved in and the tech jobs that come with it are driving up all the real estate...

The creative team Dysart/Ponticelli surprised me 10 years ago with their excellent take on Unknown Soldier for Vertigo. This time Dysart takes it closer to home. Goodnight Paradise came about from his seventeen years of living on the beach in Venice, California, and the friendships he built with the houseless community there. Everything in the book is based, to a greater or lesser degree, on some true events that he witnessed or heard about secondhand, including the murder that’s central to the

This book is great. I need to gather some thoughts.

When the solicit for this book came out, my coworker and I agreed that this book was either going to be excellent or terrible. I'm thrilled that it was the former. I'm usually not a fan of the muddy color pallet, but here it's used not just to imply grittiness, but to acknowledge the constance of the California wildfires happening in the background.The background is what bumps this book from four to five stars. It's anti-capitalist, pro-rebellion, anti-gentrification, anti-realtors (which I very...

Homeless addict with mental health issues stumbles upon a dead body and spends the rest of the series walking around Venice Beach trying to solve their murder. It meanders around from place to place making commentary about gentrification and homelessness while our protagonist Eddie gets drunk. I liked the unreliable narrator and how the whole world felt like a villain because the plot kept turning, but I didn't much like the characters and the art was spotty throughout.

A fantastically bleak story, full of unfortunate characters trying to salvage some good out of all the chaos. This was one of the 1st runs with TKO and was very impressed with the production of the book (binding and size) and found the color palette to be fitting to the environment for the story.

Murder mystery from Venice Beach and the homeless community. The art is interesting and different and I also liked how they change the style with the flashbacks. The story is well written and it's unfolding nicely so you probably won't be able to guess the whole plot in the middle of the book.It was really hard to relate to the characters but at least it was an interesting probe to the community of Venice Beach residents. Not a book you will be rereading anytime soon but a solid 3* read.

Well, alright, where to begin? I wish I would like it. The sad little story about bums and street children of Venice beach. Bit of murder and revenge story. Bit of how they ended on the street and how their lives were. But I had a hard time to find my way to the main characters, who just paved the way to their destinies by themselves. There is a slight hint of social criticism. To blame the bad state of mental health care in the US. Broken families. Social injustice. But for what? Any of the cas...

Goodnight Paradise collects issues 1-6 of the series written by Joshua Dysart and art by Alberto Ponticelli. Eddie, an alcoholic homeless hippie living in Venice Beach, stumbles upon the body of a teenage runaway in a dumpster. Eddie can't shake the young girl's death and decides to try solve the girl's murder. A very interesting and unique take on the murder mystery format. The book is also a social commentary of the gentrification of Venice Beach with tech companies moving in and buying all th...

The only thing holding this back from a fifth star is my personal preference for having at least one character in a story that I could like. This story doesn't have that, but it was so good that I couldn't put it down, because I wanted to find out what would happen next.The central character is a homeless alcoholic who, frankly, gets drunk on not very much beer, based on the evidence of the story. Horrific crimes begin to happen around him, and his efforts to find out what is going on make the r...

Goodnight Paradise is a graphic novel published by TKO, a relatively recent comic book publisher. It’s a murder story that takes place within the homeless community of Venice Beach. My overall experience of reading this book was negative, but I did find some really good things as well:GOOD- that palm tree cover. So evocative, minimalist, intriguing. Just brilliant. - the writer’s technical skills. A really powerful, solid structure. Very convincing dialogues. - some of the larger panels and spla...

I was fortunate enough to interview the writer, Joshua Dysart, for our youtube channel. Check it out here! https://youtu.be/NVSJLjQqEz8 Be sure to subscribe.Wow!I love Dysart’s writing style. This book is never what you think it’s going to be.Socially critical, heartwrenching, graphic and disturbing, this is equal parts mystery and psychedelic freakout. Definitely has my recommendation.

Heard about TKO Studios on a podcast a few months ago & decided to pick up a few of their novels with the coupon code they offered. I finally had time to read one, and I picked Goodnight Paradise to start with based on its striking cover art and back-cover logline "Venice Beach, California / Sun. Surf. Sex. Money. Murder." It sounded intriguing...And the story created by Joshua Dysart is pretty good—Eddie, a homeless alcoholic living behind a Venice house sublet as several Air BnBs, finds the bo...

I have love/hate relationship with Joshua Dysart writing style but for the most part he does right here. Eddie is our main character here. He's homeless, a drunk, kind of a asshole, but also somehow likeable. After he discovers a young girl's dead body in the dumpster he decides to go on a hunt to find out who did it. Through visions and personal tracking down of people, he begins to uncover the truth behind the murder. This is a dark story. There's no "good" characters except maybe Eddie's son....

Dysart is not a bad writer... but this book is so poorly written. It’s a jumbled mess in which no character is fully developed and the moments that could offer some development or levity to the story are traded out for very long, cheaply handled rants that would feel like they were pushing an agenda too hard if they could only pick an agenda to push clearly.The book sets itself up to be a neo-noir piece in which the detective is a homeless man... that sounds great and I am sold. But a couple cha...

I love Josh Dysart’s writing, and it does not fail here, please note. If anything, my rating has more to do with the disconnect between subject and medium than with the quality of the narrative. That is to say, reading this trade paperback in the comfort of my home after spending $20 on it at the local comic shop created a terrible gulf between myself and the material — I felt like a profiteer on homelessness, a predatory tourist of sorts. Again, I am not accusing Dysart, his team, or TKO of thi...

Bum noir.Rather good actually, it stretches and subverts the genre with an unusual protagonist - a homeless confused drunk set on solving a crime - offering a starker vantage point on social ills and injustices that are so often at the core of crime, which gets relegated to the realm "results of poor personal choices" instead. It might be a bit schlocky and gory yet at its heart, it's a little humanist vignette with great art & coloring.

Brings you deep into the homeless world of Venice Beach. Beautifully drawn and imagined.

Undoubtedly, here, TKO studio changes the game slowly. It may be a bit far-fetched to consider them the next vertigo, but who knows, it? That's perhaps my third favorite, Sara and Sentient!Whereas Dysarten utilizes Eddie as the POV character to look at homelessness, the mental health problems and drug dependency, and gentrification because of the influx of technology companies, even if this is only another homeless adolescent murder mystery. Your usual easy case is also not the assassination eni...

What a thoughtful, wake-up nudge to remind the reader, yeah you be glad your situation is where its at. Well told, beautifully illustrated, an all around home-run from Joshua Dysart, Alberto Ponticelli, and TKO.