Date: 02/04/2007

Category: · Writing  » Reviews  » Comic Books · Writing  » Topic  » misc

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How is it that you've never heard of The Ballad of Halo Jones? It's been around for about 20 years, so you have absolutely no excuse for not diving into this unjustifiably unknown sci-fi pleasure. The year is 4950 or so, and life sucks for a group of young women living in a messy unemployment colony called "The Hoop." Mean aliens, dangerous criminals, and inescapable poverty drive some folks to withdraw to a sort of elective lobotomy -- "drummers," they're called, because all they do is nod along to the electronic drumbeat that's piped into their brain. Pretty much everyone is miserable. Ick.

It's hard for Halo and her friends to escape that sort of life -- in fact, of them, only Halo survives and escapes the Hoop, launching a series of adventures that bounce from a majestic space cruiseship to superintelligent rats to a terrible war to a planet with gravity so strong it'll squish you into a flat, wide puddle if you step outside your anti-grav suit. Throughout, Halo's strong, smart, and unflinching, even when everything's falling apart for the thirtieth time. And then, in the end, when asked about her adventures, she shrugs, "anybody could have done it." Beautiful stuff.

So it's nearly heartbreaking that the book is as unknown as it is -- certainly its author, Alan Moore, is known far better for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta and Watchmen. The official story certainly does feel unfinished (Alan ways that Halo's current owners, IPC, won't give him the rights to write further chapters). So that means that it's up to the fans to keep Halo's adventures chugging along. After all, Alan's not so special -- anybody could do it.

Calvario Hills, by Marti, is multi-textual. At least, we hope it is, because reading it straight doesn't yield a very rewarding experience. Part one is a meandering, over-literal pageant of life in the inner city; part two is an even more literal tableau of corrupt politicians. The utterly unsubtle dialogue serves up painful declarations like "the day the pacifists succeed in disarming the white man is the day the apes will take over," and "once I've logged in my vote on the electronic voting machine my loyalty to my candidate is unshakable." Everyone in the book is a useless stereotype of a conservative, as irrelevant as Amos & Andy or Speedy Gonzales, and not even slightly as funny.

The only hope for this utterly unappealing book is that it's a parody of masturbatory political titles like Everyman or The Homeless Channel. Those books belong to a style that is so completely implausible, so dementedly exaggerated, so unbelieeeeeevably self-indulgent that the only possible way to respond is by making fun of them. So we hope to God that that's what's going on here: that Calvario Hills sits satirically on the outside, looking in with a seriousness that is only pretend.

In other news: Epic battle! James Kochalka's Monkey vs Robot is a simply-drawn, nearly wordless tale of the conflict that has raged since time immemorial between our primate cousins and our metallic children. Oh, why can't they get along? It's so hard to know who to root for: the monkeys are just like us, with their amiable cheeping and hairy countenances, but so are the robots, with their flailing limbs and oily excretions. What drama!

Ever since reading his books Super Fuckers, we've had a hyyyuuuuuge crush on Mr. Kochalka and his gentle art, which manages to be both gritty and smooth at the same time -- rough-textured with its dirty battle scenes, but also pretty and precise with only a handful of cartoony lines to evoke the world's most important battle EVAR.