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Hectic Planet #3
Hectic Planet Vol. 3: The Young and the Reckless
by Evan Dorkin
The third collected volume of Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz-award winning creator Evan Dorkin's Hectic Planet series brings readers another unhealthy dose of Dorkin's pop-culture obsessed future of 2074. Welcome back once again to a universe filled with aimless youth living on broken down spaceships, alien ska bands, overbearing security robots, psychotic mercenaries on the run, multi-species anti-gravity sex clubs, guerilla tele-journalists, and, of course, cheap beer - all colliding with humorous, dramatic, and violent results. The Young and the Reckless is a 96-page trade paperback collecting Hectic Planet # 5 and #6, as well as the Vroom Paid in Full one-shot, and also includes new linking material and art, pin-ups, ska and punk album art from Mr. B's Ballroom, and all-new packaging art. A nifty new addition to the Evan Dorkin library of craziness!
The third collected volume of Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz-award winning creator Evan Dorkin's Hectic Planet series brings readers another unhealthy dose of Dorkin's pop-culture obsessed future of 2074. Welcome back once again to a universe filled with aimless youth living on broken down spaceships, alien ska bands, overbearing security robots, psychotic mercenaries on the run, multi-species anti-gravity sex clubs, guerilla tele-journalists, and, of course, cheap beer - all colliding with humorous, dramatic, and violent results. The Young and the Reckless is a 96-page trade paperback collecting Hectic Planet # 5 and #6, as well as the Vroom Paid in Full one-shot, and also includes new linking material and art, pin-ups, ska and punk album art from Mr. B's Ballroom, and all-new packaging art. A nifty new addition to the Evan Dorkin library of craziness!
- GenresGraphic NovelsComics
96 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2001
19 people want to read
About the author
Evan Dorkin
276 books143 followersEvan Dorkin is an American comics artist and writer.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 19, 2012
Writer-artist titles are an odd beast. They move along at a breakneck pace often because the writer-artist (who spends far more time creating 30 pages at a time than most novelists spending writing 300) is simply moving through the story (and the emotions that inspire it) faster than pages can be drawn, inked, and lettered. This can result in books that vary widely in theme and tone from issue to issue, to say nothing of how a series changes from beginning to end.
Which brings us to Hectic Planet vol 3.
I'm not sure what I expected by this point in the series, but let's just say it's been a long time since I finished Vol. 2, and things this time around are only vaguely like what I remembered. Gone are the tongue-in-cheek space operatics, and even the wry commentary on youth culture has lost its nudge and wink. The Young and the Reckless is instead focused, with decreasing self-awareness, on using a veil of near-future dystopia to discuss hot-button issues like whether ska or punk is better, how much ex-girlfriends suck, and how weird life is when you're growing up in New York City. Oh, and also, fuck the po-po.
These are all themes that have a certain nostalgic validity when handled with passion, but by this point I can't tell if Dorkin's using his pop culture soapbox to celebrate the irrelevance of youth, or condemn it. Page-long rants about the importance of B-movies and fashion that only a teenager (or a teenager-at-heart) could take seriously are side-by-side next to more measured arguments for why the common miseries of adolescence (mainly lost love and boredom) aren't really that big a deal.
It's an odd mix, made stranger when broken up by a 30-page bloodbath starring a villain that's been AWOL since book 1. This brings up the next point: the batshit craziness of HP's joyful sci-fi worldbuilding now seems to have completely run amok, as characters and plotlines from earlier arcs get mentioned again only to prove they exist. If nothing else, the book seems to be trying to insist that yes, this really still is the same series as it was back in issue #1.
But is it? And who cares if it is? What the hell was it even about, anyway? And was it fun while it lasted?
I don't really know. I feel like someday I'll have to just finish the series with The Bummer Trilogy, but I have a feeling my questions will be left unanswered. Hectic Planet may just be one of those series by a young artist who didn't know any better but to make it as best he could, and in a world in which it's increasingly difficult to get publishers to take a chance on a project as totally weird as this one, the fact that it got made at all is sort of satisfying in and of itself.
Which brings us to Hectic Planet vol 3.
I'm not sure what I expected by this point in the series, but let's just say it's been a long time since I finished Vol. 2, and things this time around are only vaguely like what I remembered. Gone are the tongue-in-cheek space operatics, and even the wry commentary on youth culture has lost its nudge and wink. The Young and the Reckless is instead focused, with decreasing self-awareness, on using a veil of near-future dystopia to discuss hot-button issues like whether ska or punk is better, how much ex-girlfriends suck, and how weird life is when you're growing up in New York City. Oh, and also, fuck the po-po.
These are all themes that have a certain nostalgic validity when handled with passion, but by this point I can't tell if Dorkin's using his pop culture soapbox to celebrate the irrelevance of youth, or condemn it. Page-long rants about the importance of B-movies and fashion that only a teenager (or a teenager-at-heart) could take seriously are side-by-side next to more measured arguments for why the common miseries of adolescence (mainly lost love and boredom) aren't really that big a deal.
It's an odd mix, made stranger when broken up by a 30-page bloodbath starring a villain that's been AWOL since book 1. This brings up the next point: the batshit craziness of HP's joyful sci-fi worldbuilding now seems to have completely run amok, as characters and plotlines from earlier arcs get mentioned again only to prove they exist. If nothing else, the book seems to be trying to insist that yes, this really still is the same series as it was back in issue #1.
But is it? And who cares if it is? What the hell was it even about, anyway? And was it fun while it lasted?
I don't really know. I feel like someday I'll have to just finish the series with The Bummer Trilogy, but I have a feeling my questions will be left unanswered. Hectic Planet may just be one of those series by a young artist who didn't know any better but to make it as best he could, and in a world in which it's increasingly difficult to get publishers to take a chance on a project as totally weird as this one, the fact that it got made at all is sort of satisfying in and of itself.
Displaying 1 of 1 review