Nationalist Love is a slice of life look at the life of a far right wackjob. Not exactly a premise I'd ever find myself enjoying but here we are. The world of our protagonists is horrid and messy and the art style reflects this. Reading the novel one feels how trapped the characters are both by their social situation and their circumstances. Its a novel about how hate sniffs out love so read at your own risk.

Going into this, I had no idea what to expect considering the description. The unlikely plotline of two extreme right-wing white nationalists falling in love despite their insane bigotry was not something I’d go out of my way to read, but I figured “what the heck” and had an open mind. This comic is crass, vulgar, and sophomoric, but it adequately digs deep into the mind of guys that make hating others into a religion of sorts, and steps back to let you see their worldview fall apart as they become emotionally attached in a way that “isn’t supposed to happen” in a world of juvenile macho bravado. Now they both have to prove they aren’t homosexual to their respective friend groups, and try to stay apart, but fate doesn’t let that happen for too long. They try to play it normal, but have entangled themselves in a scene that basically wants them dead for being who they are. It seems hate was cool until they were the recipient of it.

“When Zapsky and Byro meet during a right-wing nationalist march, their joint escape from the police results in an unexpected and violent outburst of passion. Their initial euphoria quickly turns into doubt and fear—after all, if their buddies found out about them, the consequences would be terrible… But now that they’ve come together, will they be able to simply forget and move on with their lives? Or is it something more lasting, despite the risk it represents for both? “Nationalist Love” is the third graphic novel by Jakub Topor, nominated for the graphic novel of the year award at the Lodz Comics Festival.”

As you can tell, the art style is not glamorous, it is in fact one of the “uglier” comics I’ve red outside of some of the purposefully ugly stuff seen in Mad Magazine or works inspired by Ed Roth of Ratfink fame. The story is hard to get through simply because of the tone, is it trying to be comedic? Is it trying to be a hard look at bigotry and how it affects people? Does it glamorous unlikeable people? All yes sadly. While the book eventually gets somewhere, it was hard for me to not to end it before I finished and say “this isn’t for me”. I’m glad I made it to the end, and I respect the author for making a comic like this, but I honestly wouldn’t recommend this to too many people. If you are up for a total challenge to any boundaries you might have, or are into comics that get banned for crazy subject matter – this might be for you.

This is the type of reads that will leave people questioning the point of the story they've just read.

Many will find it a revolting gratuitous torture porn, others will sense that it wants to tell the reader something but are unsure of what. In my opinion, this story has a one and only message: hate is ugly, and in its pure form it kills.

Set in Poland, two good-for-nothing youngsters (age not mentioned tho, probably in their early 20s) skinheads, Zapsky and Byro, meet in a hate-rally. They throw a bottle at the cops thus ensuing a persecution by them, resulting in Zapsky offering his house to hide since his mother is away for a month. During a short period of time these dudes bond over being utter misogynists, racists, and whatever thing undereducated, angry dudes talk about. However their bond goes beyond these aspects and end up having sex with each other when they try to jerk off at some porn, hah. It's all fine and dandy until they both have to face their reality, one has to prove to his co-workers he's not a F*** whilst the other has to prove to his skinhead buddies the same.

Pressure that makes them cut ties, leaving them feeling a bit mournful in their own way. Byro tries to expand his horizons and goes for the first time ever to a gay club. It seems fine at first, however he gets irritated by the people he's surrounded with and everything goes to the drain when he gets riled up after the group starts talking about politics and critique the hate-rally. On the other hand Zapsky gets help from his coworkes to set up his profile on a dating app to find a girlfriend, When he finally gets in a relationship with a woman it turns into a toxic relationship in which she'll manipulate Zapsky to buy her stuff in exchange of sex that never happens. His coworkers notice the situation and help him to get out of that relationship.

After their failed attempt to fit in somewhere. Zapsky and Byro casually run into each other on a bus stop that makes it for a lovely reunion. Sadly one of Byro's buddies witness the scene from afar and records it, then runs to one of the skinhead groups to show them what he saw. The group hunts down Zapsky and Byro and it all ends as tragic as you can imagine. In the end, these dudes are victim of a enviroment that they made for themselves full of fear and hate, and are also victim of their self-hatred.

There's no likeable character in here, we have both extremes of society nowadays, both too brainwashed, too "online" to see beyond their nose, therefore the normalization of hate that can be seen trough glimpses of the protagonists' parents. There's also no appealing artwork to make this story more bearable, the author and illustrator chose a jarring, almost grotesque, style that meets the crudeness of the story. Very fitting imo; at times i thought it'd make a good 90's-early 2000's Adult Swim cartoon.

In resume, this isn't a light read, would i recommend it? I'm not sure...the setting is super triggering yet the topic is relevant and invites for a discussion. Read at your own risk, maybe?

Nationalist Love is a slice of life look at the life of a far right wackjob. Not exactly a premise I'd ever find myself enjoying but here we are. The world of our protagonists is horrid and messy and the art style reflects this. Reading the novel one feels how trapped the characters are both by their social situation and their circumstances. Its a novel about how hate sniffs out love so read at your own risk.

Okay, I tried so much. But I just couldn't like this book.
AT ALL.
I don't even remember when was the last time I gave a book so many chances, but it ended up disappointing me.
The blurb intrigued me and that's why I decided to read this one, I was reading a graphic novel after a long time.
But the language just got vile, the storyline seemed lost and it was plain disgusting. This book disgusted me.
On top of that, such ugly art. I mean graphic novels are supposed to have this effect right when the art pulls you deeper into the story too. But in this book's case it just repelled me more.
I couldn't find a single good thing in this book.
And honestly, I don't want to anymore. :|

I don't know what to say. I gave it 3 stars casue it wasnt bad but it wasnt good. it made me sad on how they treated the LGBTQ+ back then. I feel really bad for Zapsky and Byro having to hide who thet truly were. Will I read this again no i will not. Im glad the world has changed some. But it still has a lot of changing to do.

I'm not too sure this book is for me, I expected something else from the cover and description. I really liked how it revolved around a gay couple but the drawings were too unpleasant for my liking.

I don't even know. This was gratuitous and terrible and disgusting. The way Topor draws people is vile but hilarious. Not my preference when it comes to comics but it was entertaining; less so when the shock value wore off.

Two skinhead boys, Zapsky and Byro, meet at a hate-rally held in their Polish city. The Nationalists, our Proud Boys writ Euro, throw stuff and set fires and hurt cops. These are some revolting people. They're each stupider than the other, they got no class or brains, yet still they find each other...attractive? available? attainable maybe. Their stupid antics require them to hide from the cops...naturally they decide to do it together, since Zapsky's mother is away for a month. Hijinks ensue.

This isn't the first time I've seen these boys, just never so thoroughly reduced to their ugliest shapes and colors. As a not-especially-convinced experiencer of sequential art, this was always something I found irritating...this kind of "artwork" would get the horselaugh from so many artsy types I've known. I'd absorbed that prejudice and simply never bothered to challenge or examine it until the past few years. Now, I look at this art's clumsiness and its garishness and think...well, how better to narrate this story?

Whaddaya expect, anyway, in a world centered on two losers without a shred of class or decency between them? They are always gonna have to hide abnormal, sick sexual proclivities from the world their undereducated, credulous, angry, and powerless class lives in. Funnily enough, like so many who live in that hate-defined and -bounded world, it's also the one they resent. But Zapsky and Byro got lucky, found each other....found love...which is the most dangerous thing of all. Zapsky definitely feels this, after a brief and deeply unsettling period of being truly happy with Byro, and under pressure to prove he's not a fag to his co-workers, he sends a break-up text that callously dismisses Byro.

Zapsky's Mammele, escaping her loser son's ubiquity and her own pointless existence, is at a beach resort-cum-health spa. And guess what? She meets A Man too! (Called Manfred. No lie.) The sheer awfulness of the art, as in the ugliness of the people and the garishness of the colors, goes so well with this horrible tale of numerous disgusting creeps that it's almost eerie. And that's when I felt myself really giving up, shedding the weight of, that habit of contempt. It isn't pretty! But who said art needs to be pretty? I like Jackson Pollock and Agnes Martin, for gods' sweet sake. I'm not one of those Impressionism-über-Alles sofa-matching-art people!

Or maybe I am...and hide it from myself by liking things that made my mother cringe? That certainly includes comic books...I've been so snobby about them for so long that it feels fake to say, "there is no other way this story could've been told, and it very much needed to be told," but it's just the truth.

Chapter 3 is called "Spoiled Rich Kids"...seems to be a pattern among Polish émigré writers. Like Jedrowski in Swimming in the Dark, Topor gets a character (Byro Bad-skin here) among the wealthy who are privileged to consume and exist as they like. Then he lets him sink or swim...sink in this case. Byro's rebounding from his breakup text, and searches the Internet for gay clubs...he decides he's going to fix himself up, be less Nationalist looking, by dressing better and hiding his skinhead under his loser father's long-unused toupée. The club scene scares him, he doesn't know the culture and is about to get himself into serious trouble but is rescued by one of the rich kids. They decide to keep him when leaving the club becomes a good idea...he almost loses his cool when a "darkie" (an Arab guy called Jamal) is in the house party, too. He's eventually, and inevitably, outed as a Nationalist; but not until after kissing a straight guy at the party. The violence the posers inflict on Byro is pretty mild...more about humiliating him for not being like them. And that, despite the fact he doesn't *want* to be like them, is the worst rejection he suffers. (Not that he is recovered from being rejected by Zapsky, please understand. Just trying to figure out how to move on.)

Mammele gets lucky with Manfred. That scene's just grisly. Even Byro's parents decide to fool around (more grisly still). Byro's Dadzio figures out the kid's got his wig. That should be fun! I thought, watching him explain what the hell he was doing with the damn thing....

Chapter 4 is "Zapsky Looks for a Girlfriend"...the co-workers' plan to get Zapsky laid results in him finding one. Because he's never been in any relationship at all except the brief honeymoon with Byro, he ignores the red flags of an abusive, angry, selfish woman looking for something in exchange for the sex she doles out to him. In his months-long journey through this hell, Zapsky confronts low self-esteem, and his work pals do a lot to support him and care for him. They are crude but actually touchingly kind. Since we focus on Zapsky, we never learn anything more about what happened after Byro's night out...disappointingly...or about Mammele's reactions to the girl Zapsky gets with.

But long story short: Girl gets dumped. Zapsky gets lonely. One rainy day who does he see under a bus shelter but...BYRO!! It's a loving reunion, the bond of real love between them reasserts itself, and they, well, do what young guys do when under the heady influence of reciprocal attraction and genuine connection. They fool around.

...and there's a PoS from their earlier Nationalist lives filming their reunion.

Naturally, the evidence gets shown to the wrong people. All the old gang, I mean this literally, are on the hunt for Zapsky. They find him.

Things end as they so often do.

It's awful to know that this happens and happens and happens to men and women, cis and trans, all around the world because "don't be so sensitive" and "it's just a joke" aren't seen for what they are.

They are normalizations of hate, and soft volleys preparing the way for violence.

Well...so this Polish creator found his way to this American oldster via a social system intermediated by several levels of technology that are under a lot of pressure all the time to justify its worst users' behaviors. This is an example of positive social and personal results from being massively online. Say hallelujah and bring the jubilee.

There are some books for whom the NSFW warning is just not, well, not good enough. This has two blokes of the standard brain-dead, racist/nationalist Mitteleuropean dunderhead kind, bottling it at a protest before it kicks off into the riot they claim to want. They scram and change in a department store or mall changing rooms and before you know it they're lip-locking like they've saved each other's ugly lives. Protesting they're as straight as *insert Soviet-minded autocrat name here* they go to the home of one of them, try and fail desperately to pull on f*c*book, start fapping to some milf porn and yet before you know it are building an extension on each other's fudge tunnel.

This is a world where the creator is not at all dissuaded from showing his country (Poland, one of my favourites as a tourist, no less) in the baddest of bad lights. Diets are terrible, attitudes are shot, the first thing you see in the suburbs are dogs rutting in the streets, and if you don't stand and watch your supervisor at your desultory job thrust his John Thomas through the pages of a titty mag it's clearly because you're gay. The book can look just as ugly as its milieu mind, a real R Crumb kind of stench coming off the pages. You have to feel grateful the original hand-lettering has been replaced, although I take that back if the proper stuff was as clean, clear and crisp as what we did get.

Coming in at almost 300pp it looks like a huge chunka people in the doldrums, but with its simplistic approach to character and drama (not a bad thing here, all things considered), its large font and its 3x2 grid routine it's a book that's read surprisingly quickly. The only thing is that because it makes a virtue out of having absolutely no nuance there's little explanation for why you should be reading this in the first place. It comes across as a European version of "American History X", with sexuality and Jewishness in place of race issues (and with one very, very similar scene, and one very, very similar moral) and with everything dialled up to eleven, with subtlety in the minus scores. As a result, even if I am in favour of books like this existing – they certainly goad the milksops as other reviews I've seen testify – I can't exactly justify making a bit deal out of this trashy, brash look at a singular exuberance.

The plot had a lot of potential but unfortunately it wasn't developed properly. Tacky artwork & horrible writing.

No offense to the artist but I have to tell the truth that the art was distasteful and just too loud for my eyes to bare…

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher!

I’ve never read a comic like this one before. Two nationalist rioters meet and become gay lovers despite their beliefs and views. Alongside this there are a number of subplots, some seemingly unrelated to the plot. I really didn’t know what to make of the ending.
I was not a fan of the art style of this comic but it was interesting to read something I wouldn’t normally pick up.

I read this for free through netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

It's Gay? BUT DOES NOT SLAP.

You could literally not pay me to finish this work. And the reasoning is 50/50 art and content.

The way that they speak about women is disgusting, and within the beginning of the book we hear about a pretty disturbing act of violence against a woman.

The art, honestly goes from moderately unsettling to I had to close the PDF and now wish I could find eye bleach. Because I want to permanently forget I ever saw this.

2 stars

Two young men meet at a fascist March & start a relationship, despite their own internalized homophobia & the violence surrounding them. Ugly art, disjointed side plots, & a confusing ending obscure what could be a meaningful story.

[What I liked:]

•The themes of the story are timely. It’s a coming of age story that covers misogyny, racism, right-wing conspiracy, violent homophobia, misinformation, & political unrest. I (think) the novel is set in Europe, but it just as easily could be set in the US where I live.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•There are a few subplots that had potential, but ended up not really relating to the main story at all, so I’m confused why they exist (one MC’s mother’s friend’s romance at a health resort, for example)

•I’m not a fan of the art style at all. Not everything has to be “beautiful” or elegant, but I just find this art style straight up ugly.

•The ending is unclear to me. Did the MC fall into the tiger pit, or did just the dog fall? What happened to the other MC?

•The most frustrating aspect of this novel for me is that I got very little insight into how the MC’s relationship changed their thinking, goals, ideals, etc. If it didn’t change anything, what’s the point of the story? The only clear takeaway I got from the story is that fascist gangs are violent. I’m disappointed there wasn’t more character development.

CW: sexual content, violence, racism, misogyny, anti-semitism, homophobia, substance abuse

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]