By Jon Hammer (Piranha Press/DC)
No ISBN:
During the anything goes 1980s the field of comics publishing expanded exponentially with new companies offering a vast range of fresh titles and ideas. To combat this upstart expansion, Marvel and DC also instigated and created innovative material for those freshly growing markets with the latter cartoon colossus especially targeting readers for whom old-fashioned comicbooks were anathema …or at least a long-abandoned dalliance.
DC created a number of new, more mature-oriented imprints such as Vertigo and Helix, but some of the most intriguing projects came out of their Piranha Press sub-division, formed in 1989 and re-designated Paradox Press in 1993.
When DC founded this adult special projects imprint, the resulting publications and reader’s reaction to them were mixed. It had long been a Holy Grail of the business to produce comics for people who don’t read comics and, despite the inherent logical flaw, that’s a pretty sound and sensible plan.
However, the delivery of such is always problematic. Is the problem resistance to the medium?
Then try radical art and narrative styles, unusual typography and talent from outside the medium to tell your stories: you get some intriguing results but risk still not reaching a new audience whilst alienating the readers already on board…
This eclectic and overwhelmingly effective tome was one of the best and simultaneously one of the least appreciated…
Dick Shamus lives in New York City. Not necessarily the one you know but one equally composed of snippets of books, flickers of films and TV titbits all filtered through the fried brains of an incorrigible addict who’s been off his prescription Lithium for far too long now…
Dick Shamus is a Private Eye. If he says so then it’s got to be true, right?
On one night so much like every other, Dick, bombed out of his gourd on his tipple of choice – embalmers’ formaldehyde with a chocolate drink chaser – picks up a useful tip about a Nazi weight-lifting club from one of his usual sources: few of them credible and none of them real…
The drink might be the secret CIA vaccine to prevent AIDS but it sure plays hob with the deductive faculties…
The side of the city only he can see tells the weary, ravaged gumshoe that there’s a connection between the Fascist health fanatics, India and the Drowned Girl – whoever she is – and as his personal reality intercepts and continually collides with the equally outrageous consensus reality the rest of us are stuck with, Dick is carried by events to a tragic and disturbing rendezvous.
If only he could recall who the client was…
Raw and savagely beguiling, the one night’s odyssey of the perceptually challenged Shamus as he weaves between rich bastards, gutter-scum, gullible art-trendoids, yuppie-gentrifiers and armchair anarchists, affable protester-bashing cops and a hundred other “normal†folks in search of his dimly perceived targets…
This disturbing, hard-luck pilgrim’s progress is as truly thought-provoking, hard-bitten, revelatory and socially castigating as the works of Dashiell Hammett, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Raymond Chandler or Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, whilst the brutally unrefined and intoxicatingly vibrant painting of author Jon Hammer makes this perhaps the very best psycho-detective graphic novel you’ve never read.
But all that could change if and when you too track down The Drowned Girl…
© 1990 Jon Hammer. All rights reserved.