The main character is Eddie Valiant, and Eddie Valiant is a racist misogynistic prick. He’s also a private eye, who takes a case helping Roger Rabbit work out why his bosses aren’t giving him his own cartoon - until Roger Rabbit shows up dead, and Valiant swerves into helping solve Roger’s murder. Valiant himself is not a good person, and while he gets slightly less racist against Toons as the story progresses, he’s still a regular racist, as well as a misogynist and an otherwise odious person. As well as that, his voice wasn’t that interesting to read. I was expecting a hard-boiled noir narrative, but Eddie’s narration is pretty straight, apart from a few flourishes or colourful metaphors here and there.

Aside from that, the world of this novel is just grim. Nobody’s a good person! I’ll get to Jessica later, Roger’s nice but also pathetic, and everyone else has a hidden shady agenda and a laundry list of bigotry. There’s a horrible moment later on in the narrative where Eddie confronts a villainous character who is dressed in drag, and the story just swerves into violent transmisogyny for a chapter, portraying this character as a joke and a perversion. Even Roger, the nicest character, was accidentally mind-controlling Jessica and wanted to frame Eddie for murder!

Okay, let’s talk about Jessica. Poor Jessica. You know how in the movie Jessica’s genuinely a good, nice person who doesn’t like being oversexualised and loves her husband? Yeah, this Jessica’s a golddigger and a ‘slut’ who lies about being sexually assaulted to save face and wants to sleep with every man she comes across. It’s a gross, misogynistic stereotype, and such a bad characterisation! Eddie finds a porn comic she did when she was younger, and she protests that she was drugged into doing said comic, but two men involved in the shoot claim this isn’t true and Jessica enjoyed it. The narrative treats their account as real and Jessica’s as a lie, despite none of them offering evidence and the fact that the men have a motive for lying about it. It’s disgusting, and Jessica herself is a shallow cardboard cutout with boobs. Just makes the movie version so much more impressive by comparison, that she manages to be a proto-feminist character despite this origin.

I feel like I must mention here the few bits of praise I have for this book. The idea of Toons in a real-life world is interesting, Toons speaking with word balloons and this being a plot point is a cool detail, and things like Toon doppelgangers are nice ideas. It’s just that good ideas don’t really go for much when the whole isn’t a good experience.