Hicksville

AUTHOR: Horrocks, Dylan

ARTIST: Dylan Horrocks (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1992-1996

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1998

Publication History

Dylan Horrocks originally serialized the majority of Hicksville across issues 1-10 of his comic book Pickle between 1992 and 1996. Though Horrocks had previously published works in New Zealand, Australia, and England, Pickle was significant in introducing him to North American audiences. Pickle’s publisher, the defunct Canadian company Black Eye Books, issued a complete version of the novel in 1998 that included around fifty pages of previously unserialized content. Drawn and Quarterly published a new edition of the collected version in 2001.

Despite the generally high regard in which readers and critics held Hicksville, this edition soon fell out of print. A new edition arrived in 2010, also from Drawn and Quarterly, with new cover art and an expanded glossary, though it lacked the two-page introduction by the mononymic cartoonist Seth that had graced previous editions. Most notably, this edition opens with a thirteen-page introduction in comics form in which Horrocks traces his relationship to the medium and discusses the experience of creating Hicksville.

Plot

Because Horrocks employs a nonlinear, discontinuous, and fragmentary style of storytelling in Hicksville, the book’s narrative resists easy paraphrase. At the novel’s heart, however, is the story of Leonard Batts, a North American journalist for the fictional Comics World magazine, who travels to the town of Hicksville on the East Cape of New Zealand. Seeking information about Dick Burger—a newly minted mainstream comics superstar whose work has revitalized the superhero genre—Batts finds himself in a rural community where, inexplicably, everyone reads and admires comics of all kinds. Despite this, few of the town’s residents speak to Batts about their distinguished former citizen, and many treat Batts with open contempt for merely mentioning Burger’s name. Even the few who speak to him at all offer little more than obtuse allusions to Burger’s past misdeeds, along with suggestions that only Kupe, the mysterious and unseen lighthouse keeper, can tell the full story.

Provoked by the otherwise friendly townspeople’s aggressive disdain for his research, Batts makes an ill-advised attempt to provoke them at their annual Hogan’s Alley party, to which all are supposed to come as a favorite comics character. As Batts runs away from the party in pursuit of a vision that has haunted him throughout the prior chapters, he accidentally plunges off of a cliff and into the sea.

Batts wakes up the next day in the previously inaccessible lighthouse, where he meets Kupe, who had fished Batts out of the water the night before. Kupe at last explains Burger’s crime: In the basement of the lighthouse is a secret library that contains comics for which the world was not yet ready, many of them works of great genius, but none of them available elsewhere. As a young man, Burger became fascinated with an unpublished graphic novel about the Superman analogue Captain Tomorrow that was meant to provide an elegant end to the long-lived hero’s story. Violating the taboo around the library, Burger stole the originals of this tale and fled to the United States, where he published the work as his own after updating the art and changing the ending to leave Captain Tomorrow’s fate open. On learning all this, Batts flies to the United States and confronts Burger who returns the original novel in exchange for Batts’s silence. At Hicksville’s end, Batts returns to New Zealand, ready to explore the histories of comics that might have been.

Horrocks weaves a host of other stories into and around Batts’s narrative. Many are told in the form of comics read by characters within the novel itself. Most notable is an enigmatic tale in which three figures from different points in the history of New Zealand investigate a puzzling cartographic and topological phenomenon. Also important are Hicksville native Sam Zabel’s minicomics—titled, like Horrocks’s original serial, Pickle—that take over much of the novel’s second and sixth chapters. These comics, which offer visions of Zabel’s life in the years he was away from home, also contain comics within them—selections from Zabel’s canceled newspaper strip. The novel also regularly takes tangents into the lives of the town’s other residents, especially Grace, whose tortured love triangle with Kupe and the tearoom operator Danton led her to flee from home for some time. Grace’s story, like almost all the others that crop up throughout the book, begins and ends in medias res, a fragment of something larger. Like the books in Kupe’s library, these glimpses into other lives are hints of other histories, of stories that sit beside those that are known.

Characters

•Leonard Batts is a journalist for Comics World magazine who comes to New Zealand in search of information about Burger. Though originally from Newfoundland, Batts claims to be a U.S. citizen out of a sense of embarrassment about his origins.

•Dick Burger is a media mogul and comics superstar about whom little is known. Despite his deep sense of entitlement and self-involvement, Burger is haunted by his past.

•Sam Zabel is a recently unemployed cartoonist who returns home to Hicksville, where he offers some assistance to Batts. In a comic within the comic, Zabel recounts the story of his childhood friend Burger’s attempt to bribe him with a job in the mainstream American comics industry.

•Grace is a botanist who, like Zabel, returns to Hicksville after time abroad. She is romantically entangled with both Kupe and Danton and possesses a deep distaste for Burger, with whom she grew up.

•Mrs. Hicks is the benevolent matriarch of Hicksville. She runs the Hicksville Book Shop and Lending Library, which seems to own one or more copies of almost every comic book ever published. Additionally, she operates a small printing press and provides Batts with a bed.

•Danton is the operator of Hicksville’s Rarebit Fiend Tea Rooms and is one of Grace’s former partners.

•Emile Kópen is a comics artist, cartographer, and magician from the mysterious country of Cornucopia.

•Cincinanti Walker is a film star who takes a liking to Zabel during his brief reunion with Burger.

•Kupe is the keeper of Hicksville’s lighthouse and the protector of its taboo library of secret comics.

Artistic Style

Throughout Hicksville, Horrocks, who serves as the book’s sole illustrator, employs a rough and cartoony style. Working exclusively in black and white, he relies heavily on thickly inked lines that give his story’s characters and locales a strong sense of presence, even as they efface most of the subtle intricacies of real bodies and places. Though he maintains this commitment to minimalism throughout, Horrocks varies his style slightly in each of the embedded comics and stories that interrupt the main narrative. Excerpts from Burger’s superhero comics, for example, rely heavily on cross-hatching to give the illusion of texture and tone—a technique popularized during the 1980’s and 1990’s by mainstream artists such as Todd McFarlane. By contrast, segments about Grace’s past make extensive use of deeply inked black shadows, conveying a sense of her emotional turmoil. Horrocks’s work grows sketchiest in the excerpts from Zabel’s minicomics that occasionally appear throughout the text. Here, he employs a style clearly meant to evoke the rough-and-tumble cartooning of self-published, photocopied comics.

While Hicksville itself is slightly larger, the actual content of most of the book’s pages is exactly the size of a sheet of photocopier paper folded in half. This too calls up the minicomics tradition in which Horrocks was an active participant.

Though many of its pages contain up to nine panels, most of Hicksville’s layouts are linear and clear. For much of the book, Horrocks surrounds his panels and the space around them in black rather than white, encouraging his readers both to take their time with each individual image and to contemplate carefully the relation of each new panel to those that precede and follow it. The resultant sense of care and precision gives the book a cartographic feel that is surely no accident, as Horrocks has frequently remarked on the relationship between comics and maps. This connection between the temporal cartography of the comics page and the real spaces represented on maps finds a correlate in the care Horrocks takes in depicting the landscapes of rural New Zealand. Scholars such as Hammish Clayton and Mark Williams have called special attention to this element of Hicksville, noting the ways in which it visually quotes elements of the New Zealand tradition of fine-arts landscape painting.

Themes

If a single concern cuts through Hicksville’s various competing narrative layers, it is the status of the comics medium itself. The book as a whole can be read as a meditation on both the troubled public perception of the medium and its largely untapped formal potential. These concerns become especially apparent in the novel’s final chapters, when Batts finds himself in the town’s secret library.

The larger story of Burger also stages the historical dominance of the superhero genre over the comics industry throughout much of the twentieth century. Hicksville suggests that work such as that which Burger produces tends to obscure the other possibilities that the medium is capable of exploring. In this light, Batts’s story might be read as a hopeful allegory about the discovery that comics can do more than tell tales of costumed crusaders.

Critics tend to connect Hicksville’s interest in comics and its preoccupation with New Zealand. Just as the comics medium has traditionally been marginalized in conversations about art, New Zealand is a country that often seems to exist at the limits of the known world. Batts in particular continually reasserts the frustrations of a life lived at the limits of normalcy, from his resistance to his Newfoundlander heritage to his irritation at being the sole coffee enthusiast in a town that drinks nothing but tea. These and other such moments might be read as attempts to gain new perspective on the questions of marginalization that Hicksville’s ironically central subjects pose. In this context, the town of Hicksville itself functions as a sort of redemptive fantasy, taking something ostensibly strange—the practice of reading comics—and turning it into something ordinary and essential.

Impact

Hicksville derives from a period when many independent cartoonists were struggling to reconcile their own interests and investments in the mainstream American comics industry and its favored genre, the superhero. To this extent, Horrocks’s work is similar to otherwise different texts such as Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison (2001) and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan (2000). It is thus no accident that though Hicksville’s narrative opens with a parodic pastiche of superhero action, it proceeds to explore an array of alternative approaches to comic art.

Horrocks himself frequently cites a broad range of influences on his work, from the precise draftsmanship of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin (1929-1976) serials to Charles M. Schulz’s long-running newspaper strip, Peanuts (1950-2000). The embedded comics that frequently appear throughout Hicksville allow Horrocks to experiment with and restage many of these influences. These intratexts also point to the importance of the postmodernist metafictional gamesmanship of noncomics writers such as Jorge Luis Borges to Horrocks’s creative process.

Despite the implicit challenge that Hicksville offers to mainstream comics publishers, Horrocks found himself on the receiving end of job offers from DC Comics and its adult-oriented imprint Vertigo in the wake of his novel’s initial book publication. This association was short lived, but it speaks to the resonance of Hicksville beyond the relatively small audience of independent comics. In the subsequent years, Hicksville has remained in high regard, garnering strongly favorable reviews upon its republication in 2010. Nevertheless, Horrocks’s personal output since Hicksville’s completion has been relatively minimal.

Hicksville is important for the way it calls attention to the fundamentally transnational status of comics. In portraying the tension between the glamorous corporate entertainment capitals of Burger’s America and the quiet beauties of rural New Zealand, it encourages its readers to seek out and explore comics from more unfamiliar locales. In this regard, it has arguably helped influence comics publishers, as they have turned to previously neglected regions of the world as they search for new material. Along similar lines, Hicksville has been received as a significant contribution to the literature and art of New Zealand, suggesting its ability to reach beyond conversations about comics as such, even as it remains grounded in Horrocks’s medium of choice.

Further Reading

Campbell, Eddie. The Fate of the Artist (2006).

Seagle, Steven T., and Teddy Kristiansen. It’s a Bird . . . (2004).

Bibliography

Clayton, Hamish, and Williams, Mark. “Smoke at Anchor: Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville.” In Floating Worlds: Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction, edited by Anna Jackson and Jane Stafford. Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2009.

Horrocks, Dylan. “Sweeping Out the Lighthouse: An Interview with Dylan Horrocks.” Interview by Tom Spurgeon. The Comics Journal 243 (May, 2002).

Jackson, Anna, and Jane Stafford. “Introduction: The Gaming Halls of the Imagination.” In Floating Worlds: Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction, edited by Anna Jackson and Jane Stafford. Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2009.

Lister, Sam. “Playgrounds, Gardens, Communities, Worlds: Dylan Horrocks’s Hicksville.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 25 (2007): 138-163.