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Jul 23, 2016

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 515: Hickee v.2 #1, 2003

http://www.comics.org/series/42811/

Every now and again, I'll go into one of my local comic shops and head straight over to their indie section. These are the comics that are published by the smaller outfits, the comics that are odd sizes, and contain, more often than not, very, very odd stories. Imagine my joy, then, when I went into one store and found many of the comics I'd cast my eyes across sitting in a box for a dollar. As I've often said, don't knock the dollar bin.

Hickee is a very odd anthology comic. There's a series of one-page strips about the combatants in a medieval battle reflecting on what went right and what went wrong. There's a story about a very sensitive man from Uganda helping a sobbing American woman with her man problems, and then dealing with a...um..."problem"...of his own once he's off the phone. There's a series of strips about a man who no one understands, and another about a boy who walks through a magic door into very odd places (The Fryer's Club in 1956 being one). The art is cartoony and bit crude, but that's par for the course for a lot of underground and alt comix, and cartoony and crude is not to say that it's not skillfully drafted.

Some of the strips in this comic made me chuckle aloud, and, honestly, that's a fantastic reaction to have to a piece of humorous writing. It troubles me that I likely would never have read this collection if not for Another Dimension comics selling it off on the cheap, but I'm glad that I did have the opportunity. Much like the increasingly inappropriately named Free Comic Book Day, opportunities like this, afforded by the Dollar Bin, open us up to the fantastically-wide variety of comics that are out there.

Onward!

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