Writer/Artist/Letterer: Dylan Horrocks
Price: $19.95
Publisher: Black Eye (Early Printings), Drawn & Quarterly (Upcoming)
ISBN: 0-9698874-4-2

"The tragedy of HICKSVILLE," I wrote forty minutes after reading it for the first time, "Is that it can never be read by anybody who has not eaten, lived, and breathed comic books for most of their life." Time has not distanced me from that affirmation.

Coming out of a sixth reading, several months distant from my first encounter, I still shake my head in sadness, knowing that one of the best-crafted comics of the last twenty years - maybe of the history of the medium - can't be placed in the hands of those who need so badly to know what comics can do.

Without a thorough grounding in the history of the art, its idiosyncratic characters and unique personalities, its self-cannibalisation and its flashes of genius, no reader can sense the pulse of emotional weight that runs through HICKSVILLE. This comic is about everything every comics reader loves: the comics themselves, the people who make them, the feeling you get when you share that love with others. Those who haven't spent years in front of dusty piles of cheap paper and ink can see the bones of HICKSVILLE, but not its heart.

As the story opens, comics journalist Leonard Batts - the author of a modestly successful biography of Jack Kirby - has come to Hicksville, New Zealand in search of the hometown origins of comics' hottest superstar, Dick Burger. He quickly realises two extremely bizarre things about this quiet Antipodean town: First, everybody in the town reads comics, and not only reads them, but knows them inside and out, and can and will discourse on them at a moment's notice. Their tea room is called The Rare Bit Fiend's, their garage, Gasoline Alley. And second, nobody wants to talk about Dick Burger. In fact, most of them wish he were dead.

'I can think of no other work that blends melody and meaning so well.' We soon learn that Dick Burger has done something awful to the residents of this town, and to the world of comics in general. In order to uncover exactly what, Batts is going to have to take some desperate action.

Along the way, the text of the comic (an interesting sidenote: where most collected works seek to elevate themselves with the term "graphic novel" or its equivalent, HICKSVILLE's cover proudly proclaims "A Comic Book By Dylan Horrocks") undergoes remarkable shifts, flowing from Batts' encounters in the 'real' world to the pages of several different comic books authored by the characters. Some are autobiographical mini-comics, and some are the best-selling commercially produced works in the medium, but all are unique and compose a vital part of the narrative arc, not simply a fanciful diversion. Horrocks' art metamorphoses wildly to take in his characters' different approaches; in an interesting twist, loose cartoonish line drawings often characterise the 'real' world of the main story while more elaborate designs can be found in the secondary comics.

The primary text-within-a-text in HICKSVILLE is "Stars," an autobiographical comic written and produced by Sam, the last person in Hicksville to interact with Burger. "Stars" tells of how Burger (a childhood friend of Sam's) attempted to court him from his low-key job at a New Zealand humour weekly and into the ranks of his swelling juggernaut, Eternal Comics. In a remarkable feat of storytelling ingenuity, "Stars" lasts for over forty pages, and in the process it provides most of the emotional and factual content we need to understand what comes next - but instead of coming off as clumsy exposition, the transition is seamless. In another neat twist that blurs the narrative lines, "Stars" is depicted in the story as being printed in an issue of PICKLE, Horrocks' own New Zealand comics anthology - and the series in which the HICKSVILLE story originally ran.

This use of various storytelling styles isn't just an exercise in proving Horrocks' technical virtuosity. After all, how can one write a story about the comics industry without showing the reader some comics? Horrocks' sub-texts may be fictionalised, but they look and feel like real comics - because they may as well be real comics.

All of the traditional lines are blurred in HICKSVILLE. While the central characters of the story are fictionalised, most are based on recognisable characters and industry figures, and several real-life comics greats figure heavily as well (Todd McFarlane's cameo makes for one of the story's most side-splitting moments). Horrocks' prologue to the story, which stars himself, implies that one of the "meta-comics" in the main story, the tale of Captain Cook in New Zealand, actually exists in our world, and although this is probably a literary conceit, one cannot say for certain.

The craft of HICKSVILLE is excellent, but writing only about that is, to trot out the old cliche, like dancing about architecture. None of this would matter if the craft did not serve a story more radiant than almost any other in recent memory, and if the intersection of the two was not seamless. I am happy to say that both statements are true. Not for a single instant does the remarkable construction of story that Horrocks has created ring false, or unemotional, or fancifully irrelevant.

Everything in HICKSVILLE means something in metaphorical or emotional terms. The characters are entirely real, and the dialogue is nearly flawless - that latter fact rarely holds true for comics that deal with such heavy emotional content; most writers resort to melodrama and monologue. Horrocks' scripting hand, like his cartooning hand, is never heavy, and his every creation bursts with believability.

I can think of no other work in any medium that blends melody and meaning as well as HICKSVILLE. That's a strong affirmation, but it's the truth; the atmosphere of HICKSVILLE is more poignant than anything else I have read or seen. Heavy with insight into the comics industry, and equally heavy with insight into our personal relationships with it and with each other, it is a comic for lovers of comics. As an unabashed enthusiast of the medium myself, it is everything I ever wanted in a comic book; and it is, most definitely, a classic of our time.

Chris Conroy is a sophomore at New York University.

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