They realized that when later selling their original art at comic cons, the pin-up splash pages sold for more money, so they started drawing every page as a splashy pin-up whether the story warranted it or not. These hot artists believed writers just got in the way, and so they did away with them – stories don’t matter only flashy, sexy pictures. In the early ‘90’s a group of artists arose at Marvel with a flashy, sexy, hyperactive style that was aimed at “giving 14 year-old boys what they want” (Todd McFarlane): huge guns, massive testosterone-fueled muscles, explosions, blood, lots of clinched teeth, and lots of T&A. The story is particularly about the era of Image comics’ emergence in the early-mid ‘90’s. This sounds almost utopian in comparison to the evils of mass-market (now globalized) publishing which Hicksville confronts, but it is just such a utopia that lies at the heart of Hicksville. These free mini-comics are, of course, not shoehorned to fit market expectations, but are personal expressions of artistic vision and human soul. “They give comics away like crazy here,” says Horrocks in an interview in SPX Expo 2000. Horrocks has talked about how, since New Zealand has no publishing market for comics, artists just give away their mini-comics for free all the time. In one key scene that takes place in a comic within the comic, two cartoon characters, Moxie and Toxie, confront an editor over his narrow expectations of what kind of content is appropriate for comics and also over the way market demands stifle artistic authenticity. As an artist who is double marginalized, as a comic book artist and as a New Zealander, Horrocks is concerned with the effects globalization and market-pressure have on both local culture and personal creativity. It’s a story about comics: about their unfulfilled promise as an art form and their sad state as an industry. This nesting effect reminds me of one of my favorite movies, The Saragossa Manuscript, in which we are at one point watching a story being told in a story being told in a story told in a story…ĭylan Horrocks’ Hicksville is a comic book about comic books. (Both Watchmen and Maus also used this technique.) At one point, here, we are even reading a comic inside a comic inside a comic. It contains various “pure comic” effects, the most obvious being the way it shifts to being a comic book featured within a comic book, so that in one panel you are reading about a character looking at a comic book and then in the next panel you are reading a panel of the comic he is reading. Like Watchmen and Maus, this is a “pure comic,” by which I mean that this could only be done in the medium of comic books.
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