A Primer on Forgetting

For readers who like hybrid reportage comics and maritime minutiae, especially those who enjoy scanning margins for QR codes and coordinates. I'd shelve it with procedural graphic nonfiction and puzzle comics. Content notes for trafficking context, surveillance, storms at sea, and a few tense chases. There is no graphic gore. Ages 16+.

• Tense, salt-soaked atmosphere
• Margin puzzles that slow the current
• Trial fragments that skim instead of cut
• Ending that gestures more than resolves

Kelleher's Dublin Port is a whole weather system, from the hiss of marina Wi-Fi to the clack of patrol schedules, and the panels glow like wet rope under chartroom blues. The way Poolbeg light, VHF call signs, and hand-drawn sextant arcs interlock gives the smuggling line a tactile logic, and the sloop's absence of papers becomes a presence the book keeps testing.

It feels lived-in and slightly haunted.

Aoife's hush and Malik's prickly patience make a brittle partnership, intriguing in gestures but thin on confession.

I kept hoping the charcoal would open, that Aoife's notes would point to a pulse I could actually feel, not just decode.

The margins keep telling me this is "a manual for erasing and recovering memory", but too often it reads like homework scattered through fog. QR squares, VHF snippets, tide math, all clever, all cold.

I got tired of chasing breadcrumbs that dissolved in spray. The encrypted thumb drive is a neat hook, yet the chase drifts, and I was left staring at Poolbeg light like a stalled beacon.

Yes, the port feels specific, and Malik sparks when he shows, but the emotional wake is faint. I wanted consequence, not calibration.

Two stars for the ambition and the scratchy blues of the art. The rest left me seasick in a way that feels accidental, not designed.

The book reads like a packet of evidence: clipped captions, off-frequency dialogue, and black-salt gutters. The splice of courtroom shorthand with sonar pips is intriguing, but the panel rhythm stalls when tide tables and radio logs take over. I admired the QR gambits in the margins and the grit of Dublin Port, even as the throughline feels like flotsam nudged between docks.