Rating: WARTY!
This month's nominee for worst cover ever was originally published by Fantagraphics as twelve comic books starting in 1995. Now it's combined into one hardback published in 2005. Despite the publication dates, it's set in the 1970's and I suspect it's a lot more meaningful to the author than ever it is to any of his readers. I found it revealing that wikipedia refers to Burns as a cartoonist in its page title!
The book blurb claims that it's "...deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird." This was nonsensical to me. There was no such "moment" - except maybe in the author's own personal life!
There was nothing "hippie" and nothing "seventies" here. It was just a bunch of high-school losers who were literally being wasted - getting wasted on drugs and booze, and wasting their lives. There was no enlightenment going on here, no rebellion against the establishment - indeed, these kids were firmly entrenched in their own establishment. There was no musical revolution, nothing new. This story felt like it was really was nothing more than personal anecdotes recalling bad trips.
The whole novel reads like a bad drug trip. Maybe that's the intent, but it made no sense and wasn't entertaining for the most part. Maybe the author is trying to make sense of his youth, but the novel really didn't mean a whole heck of a lot to me. Parts of it were well done, other parts meaningless. The comics explore the same time-period or the same events from many perspectives, so there's a lot of overlap, which I suspect is easier to see in the compendium than it was in the separate comics.
The artwork isn't anything special. It's borderline competent, but in no way startling, and this is especially stark given the subject matter. The seventies was an extraordinarily flamboyant era. Why depict it in B&W? Some of the characters are really hard to tell apart. One pair of them - a dating couple - is really only differentiated by the fact that the guy has some peach fuzz on his chin whereas the girl doesn't. I'm not kidding!
It's hardly impressive art. It's all sharply, but thickly drawn black-and-white line and shade, but the story is anything but black and white. It's also drawn for a mature audience: though it's set in and around high school, there's a huge amount of drug use and a lot of explicit sexuality, with some violence and violent themes towards the end.
To me, that was really sad - that these kids evidently had nothing to do with their lives - indeed, no interest whatsoever in life - other than partying and smoking pot. Personally, I don't care if people spend their lives partying and smoking pot - it's no worse (and no better) than smoking tobacco, let's face it - but I don't get why I should be expected to be interested in reading a novel which offers that, and only that.
There was very little in this story to draw me in and and make me want to pursue it. I did finish it because it was short and because I really hoped there would be a pay-off at the end. There wasn't. What was it George Bush senior moment said? The nattering nabobs of negativity? Other than everything Reagan said, and Clinton's preposterous lie that he did not "have sex with that woman", that is the absolute dumbest thing any president ever said (with "mission accomplished" a close second!), but it George Herbert Walker's nonsensical blabber really does apply in the case of this comic.
The characters are two-dimensional, with nothing to recommend them. One was a replica of John Lennon in his pinched nose, granny-glasses period, so I started looking for others who might identify with recording artists, but I didn't see any others that I recognized, so maybe that was just a one-off. The situations were very ordinary for the most part with nothing special about any of it (with few exceptions). It was amusing that everyone seemed to have the same hair style.
The really weird thing is the mutation disease. Running through this youthful crowd is a body-fluid transmitted disease which causes physical mutations. Some reviewers have equated this with AIDS, but I don't think that's what Burns intended. I think the mutations caused by this "plague" were nothing more than a physical manifestation of teen fears.
One guy, for example, has a mouth at the base of his neck - one which speaks and seems to be controlled by a different part of his brain - or even a different brain - than his regular mouth. Which teen hasn't felt like they've said things they didn't mean or didn't intend? The girl who has sex with him contracts the disease, but her manifestation of it is that she periodically sheds her skin like a snake. Which teen hasn't sometimes wondered what it would be like to shed their skin and be someone else? Haven't serious drug abusers felt at times like they were crawling out of their skin? Other victims exhibit bumps or blisters on their face. One guy develops facial features that make him look reminiscent of a rabbit. I don't see that as a comment on the fact that he contracted the disease while humping like a bunny.
Actually, there's no pattern to this "disease" at all, and other than teens shunning other teens who have it, there is no reference to the disease from society at large - no attempt to fight it or contain it. There was no effort to explain where it came from, or why no one was really interested in it. It was like the disease was nothing more than an amateur attempt to graphically portray feelings of disaffection, rejection, incompetence and so on, but given that it all came from acts of love and passion, it made zero sense to me. Indeed, it very effectively countermanded the author's apparent intention.
Some portions of the story featured a cult of kids leaving home and migrating to the woods where they would camp out with others of their "kind". Again, this made more sense as a physical manifestation of feelings of alienation, but presented the way it was just made it seem silly and trivial. This is of course where it was easy for murders to be committed, but those made least sense of all. If the characters were not really physically living in the woods, and this was merely a representation of their isolation, then what were the acts of murder supposed to represent? If the murders were real, then what triggered them? None of this is addressed, much less explained.
One character, Eliza, was well-worth her own story, but she was given rather short shrift (or short shift!) here. She had a tail, but it was never clear if this came from the STD, or if she was naturally born with it. People are born with tails - a relic of evolution for which the creationists have absolutely no explanation whatsoever. Eliza was an artist and was giftedly so, but frankly, she didn't seem to belong to this story at all. I would have loved a story about her. She was the only character with anything to say or with any real story to tell.
Overall I can't recommend this novel. You know what it most reminded me of? Reefer Madness - that asinine movie which purportedly warns children against using drugs that was made in the late 1930s and was so awful, exploitative, over-the-top, and inaccurate that it's become a cult classic. Hopefully this limited tradition novel won't become that famous.