Mind you, people fool each other with fake orgasms all the time. But Horrocks cautions, “If you’re feeding me a wish-fulfilment fantasy, it better be your wishes, or it won’t ring true. ![]() Stimulating doubt and debate, Horrocks’ meditation on the power of images and stories finally raises cautious hope for the fresh magic awaiting in every cartoonist’s pen. ![]() I don’t trust simple answers, I just think it’s a conversation worth having.” To experience the pleasure and power of fantasy, even as they question what it means. “I don’t want the reader to try and work out my answers, I want them to explore the questions for themselves. Nevertheless, thanks to the magic of comics, that unvoiced opinion and those fantasies appear on the page. But do I worry about what we’ll find down there? Do I believe we should always bring it to the surface and share it around? That’s more complicated.”Īt one crucial stage, neither Horrocks as narrator nor Zabel as his avatar can bring themselves to assert that we are morally responsible for our fantasies. They’re like spelunkers exploring the depths of our strange mind-body cave-systems. I’m fascinated by artists who allow themselves to be indulgent, who dive deep into their fantasies and desires. Horrocks admits, “I allowed the story to take me in directions that made me distinctly uncomfortable, because I felt the need to be honest. Zabel is whisked between genres, confronting the male gaze and its escapist clichés, whether as a pneumatic super-dominatrix, a green-skinned Martian harem (below) or a manga fan’s tentacular pornotopia. Sam Zabel plays Horrocks’ alter-ego, frozen with cartoonist’s block and torn between the need to express himself in marginal autobiographical strips and the need to pay the bills by working on corporate-owned franchises. As Horrocks reveals in his new Strip for ArtReview magazine (below), “The legend of the Magic Pen has been passed by word of mouth from cartoonist to cartoonist for generations, offering a small glimmer of hope to struggling freelancers and frustrated dreamers.” All it takes is one puff of breath and paper and ink become flesh and blood and a creator can step inside his panels and consort with his characters. To rebuild that faith and find his voice again, Horrocks eventually devised another metafictional myth, not a paradise, but a pulp-confessional fairytale about the joys and pitfalls of making comics a playground for your wildest imaginary desires in Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen (Fantagraphics/Knockabout). Eventually, I lost my cartooning voice entirely, and my lifelong faith in stories and art.” I was writing in a voice that wasn’t mine and felt trapped in other people’s wish-fulfilment fantasies. ![]() Horrocks soon found himself hired by New York giant DC to script, but not draw, commercial comic books like Batgirl (#39-#57, a 19-issue run, extract below) and Hunter: The Age of Magic (one mini-series and 25 issues), a dream ticket for some, but for Horrocks a nightmare he had to escape. ![]() Hicksville’s symbolic lighthouse brims over with a Borghesian library of masterpieces, including unknown comics composed by Lorca and Picasso. In his solo debut graphic novel Hicksville (1998), Dylan Horrocks envisaged a modest, perhaps unattainable utopia for his chosen medium in the eponymous remote coastal town in his native New Zealand, whose every citizen appreciates the wonders of comics.
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