Dylan Horrocks's Hicksville: A Dream of Comics

Dylan Horrocks is New Zealand's comic book laureate. From short comics stories in New Zealand anthologies and Melbourne's 'Fox Comics' in the late eighties he graduated to his own comic book 'Pickle' from Canadian art comics publisher Black Eye Books. Much of the material from the ten issues of 'Pickle' (1993 - 1997) was then assembled into the graphic novel Hicksville, first published by Black Eye Books in 1998, then by another Canadian art comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly. This year sees a new edition of Hicksville being published by both Drawn and Quarterly and New Zealand's Victoria University Press.

The first thing to note about this graphic novel is that the main action is set, like its author, in New Zealand. In Hicksville, to be precise. Hicksville, the place, is a comic book utopia, where everyone, from the postman (Harry) to the cafe waiter (Danton), knows about, reads and loves comics. It is a town where the idea that comics are an art form goes without saying. Into this charmed world stumbles Leonard Batts, of the American magazine Comics World. He has arrived to piece together an article about the early days of Dick Burger (hoo hah, what a name!), once a Hicksvillian, now a BIG success in the American comics-movies-entertainment world. But there is a terrible secret to Burger's success, and no one in Hicksville is willing to spill the beans for Leonard Batts.

Hicksville the graphic novel (actually its cover proclaims it a 'comic book', and that's perhaps a good a description as any) is a book of many textures: the preface is a fictionalised autobiographical comics (a 'D. Horrocks' receives forlorn postcards in a cold and miserable London), there are comics-within-the-comic (two whole issues of one called 'Pickle' are included in the book, written and drawn by the hapless character Sam Zabel), there are the gag strips featuring the cartoony Toxie and Moxie, and there are rogue comics pages fluttering about the landscape featuring the travels of a nineteenth century trio (Chas Heaphy the Surveyor, the Captain Cook and Hone Heke, a Maori chief).

Like comics itself, Hicksville is simple and it's complex. Unlike most other comics, it moves from one technique to another, one voice to another, to tell its story. There are a handful of fictional authors whose comics are depicted on the pages of the book, but because all those voices are yoked to the line (written and drawn) of the one uber-author, Dylan Horrocks, the reader is given a world which is varied yet coherent. Each of the 'fictional comics' (ha!) within the book also indicate outwards, beyond the covers of Hicksville, to their own, independently operating worlds of author, and publisher, and readers. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call Hicksville a 'site upon which many comic book texts converge', or a 'polysemous text' but, while perhaps accurate, the use of either term does involve me courting the title 'wanker-critic'. So let's stick with 'comic book', like Dylan does.

This new edition of Hicksville (2010, Drawn and Quarterly) features a stunning new cover and a new preamble to the text by Horrocks (told in comics, of course), which informs us of the young Dylan's introduction to the artform by his parents, his lifelong obsession with Tintin, and the manner in which this book, Hicksville, came about amidst the creation of his own family. Given the fictional games which make up the text that follows, the introduction is radically personal, limpid and direct.

It is clear, in this book, that Dylan Horrocks loves comics with a whole heart, which includes acknowledging just how tricky that that love can be – each chapter is headed by a quote from one of the 'masters' of comic book art: Al Capp (L'il Abner) Will Eisner (The Spirit), Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion) etcetera. However, more often than not, the quotes are concerned with the business of comics, the money end of the stick. Or the disappointment end of the stick: the book begins with a quote from Jack 'The King' Kirby, the man who more than any other created the look, the feel and the energy of North American superhero comics. Horrocks chooses these words of Kirby's to start Hicksville: 'Comics will break your heart.' Ow.

Hicksville features real people from world history, real people from the history of comics, fictional characters from the history of comics, and Dylan invents his own made-up people, places and comics to fit in and around those 'real-world' and 'real-world fictional' people and characters, places and stories. The book's achievements are many, but maybe the most important one is the sense which it imparts that it is humans who are at the centre of comics. With all their messiness and muddled dreams and desire for otherness, for exotica, it is humans who make comics and so ultimately, their comics will lead us not away into other worlds but deeper into this one, where fiction works with history to build us a place to live.

With Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks gives us not only a story of comics in comics, but an idea of comics. A vision of comics. A dream of comics. This dreamworld, this comic book, once read, will become part of your own world, as all great fiction does.

Bernard Calleo is the publisher at Cardigan Comics. He blogs at An Island Art.

Bernard and Dylan will both be appearing at the Wheeler Centre event Australia 2052: The Future of the Graphic Novel event this Saturday.

Dylan Horrocks will also be running the comics workshop Unleashing the Cartoonist Within at the Wheeler Centre this Sunday.

In support of the Wheeler Centre's Drawing Out, Drawing In: Spotlight on Graphic Novels events happening this weekend, Readings has guest bloggers talking about Comics and Graphic Novels online every day this week. Tomorrow: Readings' own Christine Gordon.

Hicksville →

Dylan Horrocks

$29.95

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