It’s also Horrocks’ savaging of comics as product, stepping stones to other media rather than objects of intrinsic worth. The centrepiece is ostensibly a mini-comic by Zabel, Burger’s childhood friend, relating how he attended Burger’s ostentatious 30 th birthday party, and how temptation was dangled when he’s flown to Los Angeles to see Burger’s comics factory. There are also pages from an odd comic in an Eastern European style hybrid language by Cornucopian cartoonist Emil Kopen, and an affecting sequence where torn between two lovers Grace hears his thoughts about artistic creation. Horrocks splices the story with samples of work by Burger and his forebears, depressed humour artist Sam Zabel, and a strip about Captain Cook and the settlement of Hicksville revealed in chance snippets, always with a timely comment on Batts’ current situation. The local bed and breakfast is run by Mrs Hicks, a lady of late middle-age who further manages the town’s comics lending library, orders small press comics from Finland, and makes costumes for the annual Hogan’s Alley beach party. That, though, barely scratches the surface of a small community where comics are revered in all forms. He’s a divisive figure in his birth town. Burger has parlayed status as a hot superhero artist, viewed as the heir to Jack Kirby, into a multimedia empire, but is unwilling to talk about his past. Yet distance and progress, such as the web-comic, in no way undermines this love letter to print.Īt its most linear, Hicksville is the tale of Leonard Batts, a self-important comics journalist who’s travelled to New Zealand in order to research Dick Burger in his remote home town.

Dylan Horrocks switches styles to induce an atmosphere of magical realism and there are knowing nods to the comics world, at least as it was in the mid-1990s, which are often very amusing. Hicksville is a rich, rewarding and immensely emotional statement about the power of comics as a form, eschewing genre classification.

Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks