Ambitious comic about comics. It's interesting, but trying to sort out all the narrative levels can be a bit confusing. ( )

In Hicksville New Zealand cartoonist Dylan Horrocks has created a loving tribute to the art of the graphic novel, injected a mystery and wrapped it in an enigma.

The story has many threads, the main one being the arrival of American comics reviewer Leonard Batts in the NZ hamlet of Hicksville, where everybody is massively into comics, yet nobody wants to talk about the town’s most famous expatriate, comics giant Jack Burger. Leonard gets frustrated when he can’t make any progress on the article he wants to write about Burger, and his bafflement increases when he keeps finding scraps of a cartoon about Captain Cook and a Maori chief speculating on the nature of maps and the changing layout of the land.

Horrocks has worked in lots of tributes to classics of the genre, especially in a sequence set at a costume party, and he clearly is a big fan of Herge and Winsor McCay. (I have to admit that I probably missed a lot of his references).

This is a moving story and Horrocks leaves room for the reader’s imagination to fill in much of the detail, which adds to its charm. it’s also an intelligent tribute to an art form that Horrocks loves, and the place of creativity within it. ( )

I just happened to grab this comic with barely a glance over the blurb--unusual for me considering I'm more deliberate when purchasing comics. And what a wonderful impulse buy! This is an interesting, mysterious, meta fable into the history and industry of comics, looking into which stories are told and which aren't, with an interesting Maori influence to boot.

*******

Counting as my "written and drawn by the same person" item for the Panels Read Harder challenge. ( )

I enjoyed the art and the storytelling, but overall was a little too "inside baseball of the comics world" for me to love it. ( )

un libro denso di messaggi misteriosi, di storie dentro altre storie,di poesia e amore, amore per i fumetti.
E' impossibile raccontare anche sommariamente la trama di questo libro, anche il riassunto che troverete nella sua quarta di copertina non rappresenta che una piccolissima porzione di quello che ci troverete dentro.
Un piccolo,raffinatissimo e commuovente gioiello di cui consiglio la lettura a tutti. ( )