"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 an experimental graphic novel by author and artist Joy Rip. Come dream with us. 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 take everything about the singular phenomenon of being alive for granted. How the day-to-day rarely reveals ordinary life to be extraordinary. How amazing, how extraordinary is our 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 dominates the day-to-day. There is no greater treasure hunt. No greater supernatural. "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
