What an odd standalone Sugar Skull would make. Imagine reading it without knowing that it was the third in a trilogy of graphic novels: first X'ed Out (2010), then The Hive (2012), now this. Or then again, maybe it wouldn't make much difference. It's oblique and puzzling and suggestive, but then the whole trilogy is that. Doug is a performance artist, given to wearing masks and hanging out at countercultural events. He met his girlfriend Sarah on this scene, but her psychotic ex-boyfriend is also lurking about. Parallel to this vie more-or-less quotidienne, and intercut with it, is a Burroughsian alternate reality in which Doug's alter-ego, Nitnit, has a series of discombobulating adventures in an run-down city populated with mutants and freaks, and also in an underground breeding hive, where lizard-like humanoids patrol the corridors and seemingly human women give birth to gigantic slimy eggs. Nitnit is the reverse of Tintin (black quiff instead of blond, creepy-gross adventures in a deformed and baffling land rather than uplifting action shenanigans in the exotic hotspots of the world), and much of the beauty of this book inheres in the clever distortions and exaggerations Burns inflicts upon Hergé's ligne claire style. Sugar Skulls are the name of the skull-shaped sweets Nitnit is compelled to buy in The Hive's very last frame; and there are plenty of skulls in this volume too.
The protocols governing 'spoilers' perhaps don't apply as they normally might in a work as oblique and deliberately puzzling as this. Accordingly, though still proceeding in a caveat lector spoilerōrum fashion, we might note that the skull in question is Doug's, sugared in the vividness and high-calorie, low-nutrition buzz of its imagined universe, and sugary also in its fragility. He gets mugged by Sarah's ex and suffers a head wound bad enough to hospitalise him (hence the plaster Nitnit is always pictured as wearing). His visions are a direct reaction to this trauma. We can also trace the various hideousness connected with childbirth, dwarfs, miniature monsters, piglets and so on to the fact that Doug got Sarah pregnant and then ran out on her, leaving her to raise the kid alone The male guilt, squeezed between unhappy memories of his unhappy Dad on the one hand, and his own complete delinquency as a father on the other, inform the queasily ghastly mood of the whole trilogy, I think.
It makes compelling reading, certainly. Maybe one or two of the grotesquenesses are a little too, I don't know, obvious; and certainly they depend too strongly (I'd say) on a buried revulsion at female physicality as such, female flesh in its obstetric mode but also female sexual allure in a broader sense. And there's a slightness to the overall telling, although this may be more feature than (ugh! squash it squash it!) bug. The imagined world is pretty nightmarish, but the nightmare is different in details not in kind to the actual lived life; and Burns is good on illustrating that old saw of psychiatric medicine ... that though madness is a particular problem for a patient's family and for society as a whole, it is a particular solution for the patient him/herself. If the solution looks extreme, then think how severe the underlying pathology must be ...
No comments:
Post a Comment