A Map of Hicksville by Jason Dittmer
D
ylan Horrocks’ Hicksville (2010 [1998]) is described in a review quoted on the back cover as ‘a sweetly told love letter to the comics medium.’ This is certainly true; the comic is immersed
in the history of the medium, rich in intertextuality and comics lore. However, the comic is just as much about space and displacement as it is about comics. The plot revolves around a journalist for Comics World who goes to a small town on the north coast of New Zealand to explore the back story of Dick Burger, the most famous comics writer/art-
ist/producer of all time. He discovers in Hicksville a kind of bizarro-world, in which comics are the most-esteemed form of popular culture and everyone lives and breathes them the way the rest of the world idolizes Hollywood. The town even holds a library of the comics that should have been made, but were not (at least not in ‘our’ continuity): comics made by Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein, as well as magna opera by well-known actual comics authors. It is not surprising that this comics utopia is located in the most isolated place on earth. Its displacement from the ‘real world’ reflects the distance between the world as it is and the world as Hicksville would have it. Indeed, the term utopia in Greek is ambiguous in its translation – it can
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mean either ‘good place’ or ‘no place’, inserting displacement into the very structure of the word. Whatever utopia might be, it is definitively somewhere other than, and better than, ‘here’. Hicksville also considers the role of spatiality in storytelling, but goes beyond the usual arguments
Horrocks, D. (2010) Hicksville (Montréal: Drawn and Quarterly, 85)
about the fragmentation of space inherent to the medium of comics. Rather, in a two page sequence, Horrocks considers all forms of language and storytelling as maps. The scene is an interview by two
But the conversation cuts right through this debate like Alexander through the Gordian knot –
Hickvilleans of Emil Kópen, the famed cartoonist and national treasure of the mythical Eastern
Kópen imagines sequential images, texts, or any form of narrative as maps, even referring to himself
European country of Cornucopia (the designation of this imagined country, which values comics
as a cartographer. Kópen says that all narratives are maps because they are ultimately about the
enough to consider Kópen a treasure, as the ‘Horn of Plenty’ is itself another displacement of utopia).
spatial relationships among bodies. This is illustrated through a shift in perspective: in the first page
Initially the conversation revolves around the classic question of whether comics are primarily visual
Kópen is viewed head-on, including a picture of a classical angel figure in the background, which
or textual (Varnum and Gibbons 2001).
becomes the focal point of a whole panel as the conversation unfolds. Mysteriously the face of the angel morphs into a medieval princess; the turn of the page explains this shift via a perspectival change, in which Kópen is viewed from the side, revealing a new background for the otherwise static scene. The sequence foregrounds the necessary interpretive skill inherent to reading comics: the understanding of bodies’ orientation in space.
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012