HICKSVILLE, BY DYLAN HORROCKS

I’m rereading Hicksville (or rather just reread), one of my favorite graphic novels, after having read this little digression by the author. I’m not sure why Hicksville has always appealed to me. It contains all the abstruse ambiguity that tends to characterize the kind of literature I hate. Whenever I encounter something like, say, a David Lynch film, at first I always think I can make sense of the chaos. I figure there must be some structure and logic behind it, a clearly delineated metaphor that, once perceived, will rearrange all the disparate little pieces of evidence into a perfect level 18 high score in Tetris (with the giant rocket ship and everything). When that fails, I usually assume the author is dicking with me, and I become and angry and frustrated.

This kind of thing pops up in Hicksville in the form of a comic that keeps appearing, page by page, in various places within the novel. The comic is about Captain Cook, marooned on an island in New Zealand, aided by the Maori warrior Hone Heke. They are trying to determine their exact location by studying maps and the stars, and even find a cartographer who is equally lost. It turns out the island is moving. The comic spans three realities in the graphic novel: in the beginning, a man named Augustus E. mails them to Dylan Horrocks himself, who is apparently wallowing in England; one of the characters, Leonard Bates, a comics journalist, keeps finding pages of the comic in odd places (at tea shops, blowing across a field, etc); finally, the Captain, Hone Heke, and the cartographer actually appear in Hicksville at a party, and Leonard chases after them and falls off a cliff.

I gather this all relates to Horrocks’ thoughts on comics as a way of mapping time, and their potential for escaping time-based narrative in favor of geographic narrative, in which the fiction depicts spaces for a reader/user to explore, rather than a preset sequence of events. Maybe all the comics within comics are Horrocks’ experiment in non-linear, parallel storytelling, and weaving together his own world, his fictional creation, and his creations’ creations is his way of providing the reader with more space to explore. Whatever that means.

Actually, Hicksville is appealing for a bunch of basic reasons. Horrocks is an awesome cartoonist, suggesting vast oceanic skyscapes with a few light pen-strokes and suffusing his characters with depth and emotion using deceptively simple, almost childish, drawings. The writing is also excellent, and all the basic gags and tales are wonderful and entertaining. As Seth points out in the intro, the primary draw is probably the thin fog of mystery and wonder that pervades each page, as if the medium of comics were a force of nature.

Anyway, I still love this book, and I still don’t know why.