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Tepid
Original 1st edition!!!
48 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 2003
5 people want to read
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July 15, 2018
One of the best alternative comics artists around. You can special order this directly from the author, though I found it in Quimby's in Chicago, a 2003 story written in the time the author lived in suburban Chicago Westmont. Could be read with also Chicago area Nick Drnaso's Beverly (a far southern area of Chicago). Both are kind of commentaries on suburbia.
Tepid opens like a simple memoir about a boy growing up playing Little League baseball. Sweet. Well, not so fast. There are panels that precede that early story that one might be tempted to skip over, and let's take the cover, the boy in question in a cardboard box in his closet. And then we learn, amid the story of baseball, of Eleanor, an elusive (oh, everyone is elusive in Hankiewicz comics) foreign exchange student who stays at his house and never speaks.
Then we meet an older boy and his mother, who drives him to games and practices. The older boy wants to quit baseball, and in the process he seems to reference Eleanor. Wait! Have we moved ahead in time and this is the young boy several years in the future? Then we see the first boy is also in the car. The story gradually slides into surrealism, where conversation turns to athletic cups and the older guy putting ice cream in his cap, the ice cream melting down. The boy suddenly has one eye, and by that I mean there is no evidence an eye has ever been there. Are we in the province of Dali? Fellini? David Lynch's Blue Velvet? I think so. This story is weird, but it is also beautifully drawn, mysterious, with a touch of suburban horror.
Tepid opens like a simple memoir about a boy growing up playing Little League baseball. Sweet. Well, not so fast. There are panels that precede that early story that one might be tempted to skip over, and let's take the cover, the boy in question in a cardboard box in his closet. And then we learn, amid the story of baseball, of Eleanor, an elusive (oh, everyone is elusive in Hankiewicz comics) foreign exchange student who stays at his house and never speaks.
Then we meet an older boy and his mother, who drives him to games and practices. The older boy wants to quit baseball, and in the process he seems to reference Eleanor. Wait! Have we moved ahead in time and this is the young boy several years in the future? Then we see the first boy is also in the car. The story gradually slides into surrealism, where conversation turns to athletic cups and the older guy putting ice cream in his cap, the ice cream melting down. The boy suddenly has one eye, and by that I mean there is no evidence an eye has ever been there. Are we in the province of Dali? Fellini? David Lynch's Blue Velvet? I think so. This story is weird, but it is also beautifully drawn, mysterious, with a touch of suburban horror.
Displaying 1 of 1 review