REVIEWS
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CHROME FETUS COMICS Review by Henry Chamberlain Chrome Fetus #6 is a joy to read. It makes you think of those hedonistic Sundays when you can spend all day in last night's clothes or naked in languid decadence. That seems to be the perpetual state Hans Rickheit's characters find themselves in. At least the ones still alive and free to move around. Rickheit's meticulous style, at times, echoes Chris Ware while maintaining a more loose and organic line. His twins, Cochlea and Eustachia, would likely lose some of their depraved sensuality rendered by Ware. They are Rickheit's Jimmy Corrigan, the perfect example of his sensibility: esoteric, gothic, and decidedly surreal. Cochlea and Eustachia mostly pad about an old mansion in masks and nighties that barely go below their waists. These two girls are lovely and strange from their protruding foreheads down to their perfectly big feet. What is so remarkable about them is that they would be compelling no matter what they did, which often revolves around finding a dead alien fetus. Not enough praise can be heaped upon Rickheit for fully realizing, texture by texture, pattern by pattern, loose limb by loose limb, his own comics world. This is no small accomplishment. Nor is the fact he compresses so much stimulating work into a 32-page mini-comic. For all the frenzied intricate fun, a comparison to Winsor McCay is within reason. Among other Rickheit characters, a deranged homicidal dwarf king rounds out this beautiful nightmare. But it is Cochlea and Eustachia who will steal your heart Ð literally, given half a chance.
Review by Christopher Allen by Hans Rickheit are some of the strangest and most unsettling comics IÕve read. IÕm not sure how long heÕs been producing them, but #4 features one-page strips from 1999, all self-contained and often appearing by themselves in anthologies, but telling a kind of story when placed together like this. A tall, dapper man in trenchcoat and teddy bear head moves through a kind of dream world with its own cruel logic. Example: he sees his birdcage is empty; finds a small, grotesque creature of baleful eye, brain-like contours and randomly placed teeth and claws gurgling in the corner; digs in and pulls out a kitten. Punchline: the kitten is placed back in its little cage, no home for a bird at all. This is typical of the book; the teddy-man has adventures of a sort, but without dialogue and with few sound effects and no facial expression at all, the better to disturb the reader with the nightmarish creatures, random violence and cruelty, and games of reality manipulation. ÒSpace Filler FunniesÓ are anything but; rather, theyÕre even more highly concentrated blasts of RickheitÕs id. Issue #5 finds the teddy-man stepping aside for a regular-looking guy on his own quiet journey through a world only superficially ours, but the effect is the same. However, itÕs clear that Rickheit has developed further as an artist and storyteller, the panels larger, the designs more ornate, and the storytelling more relaxed and confident. Strange things still waft through the book, including an almost beautifully delicate monstrosity that calls to mind something from Jim WoodringÕs Frank, but Rickheit takes a little more time to let these images sink in, to better effect. There is also a greater emphasis on the horrors of of the human body, with a naked woman who may or may not have a head being hooked up to some bizarre gizmo, and the man entering this strange world through the anus of another odd creature. ÒCochlea and EustaschiaÓ looks to be an ongoing feature, dialogue-heavy for a change, of two precocious twins in a bizarre house, here interacting with an oozing, uddered torso they find in a drawer. As stated before, there is a preoccupation with the human body, but with the girls there is now more of an overt sexual charge running through the story, supremely heightened with the contrast of the curvaceous young women in a setting of stifling, severe furniture and obsessive crosshatched textures. In #6Õs lead-off story, ÒMadam Mollusk,Ó Rickheit further merges the ghastliness of people and objects when the teddy-man pulls a beautiful, blindfolded woman from a casket, pulls up her nightgown and reveals two cabinet doors in her torso, which fold open easily for the rearrangement of intestines. ÒCochlea and EustaschiaÓ appear thrice more, with RickheitÕs same concerns: anal probes, deadpan humor, archaic interior design and hideous creatures going about unfathomable tasks. One could call it redundant, but like the aforementioned Frank, the imagery is so rich the stories remain a treat. ÒHail JeffreyÓ calls to mind Harlan Ellison at his least restrained: pitiable retainers attending to the whim of a cruel, child-man despot. It might be a political allegory (the final caption reads: ÒIsnÕt it obvious?Ó) but the events are so objectionable it is likely to offend many from either end of the political spectrum. A fascinating, alive series. What an absolutely unique comic experience. Robert Young (from The Comics Interpreter, something everybody should be supporting) had told me, but wow. The only person that comes close to his uniqueness and insanity would be Jim Woodring, but it does a disservice to them both to be compared, as they're both completely doing their own thing. Panels in this seems perfectly normal, like it's just a guy going about his day. Then you see something wriggling in the next frame, or a little baby with a rhino head getting its head scooped, or a screw being driven into a bloated body with a turkey head, or a man with the head of a bird pissing on a large crowd, and you realize that you're looking at something that's never even crossed your mind. He has a vast body of work, which is music to my ears, because that means there's tons more to discover. I hope the scan does it justice, but he also has some of the most detailed panels that I've ever seen. Every single person in this drawing had some serious time and effort put into them, and that's a fairly incredible thing to say about a crowd shot. Other things in here include small children dropping cinder blocks from the top of a tall building, a man entering the anus of a large rat balloon, a hairy lollipop and effluvial spurts. It's $2.95 and indispensable to the expanding of your brain. Review by Heath Row Chrome Fetus Comics #5 Hot off the heels of Hans Rockheit's Xeric reprint Chloe, this 36-page collection of shorter pieces continues to expand on Rickheit's darkly surreal world of biological experiments and organic machinery. "Meander" is a dream-like linear narrative that involves inflatables, trains, and sex education. "Please Don't Do This" is a surprisingly shocking cartoon. "Cochlea and Eustachia" introduces two characters I hope Rickheit returns to. Two masked nymphets explore their environment while eluding a pursure. And "Folly" continues the cartooniness of "Please Don't Do This" in an almost Dean Haspiel manner. Another delightful surprise of an ending. Rickheit's artwork continues to improve, and even though I prefer his longer pieces, the shorter bits of punctuation -- like the bearhead sequences -- all add up to create the disturbing world that Rickheit's visions thrive in. From The Comics Interpreter Review by Chad Parenteau Towards the end of last year, amidst the growing critical acclaim of his graphic novel, CHLOE, long-time mini-comics creator Hans Rickheit made a futile attempt to encourage posters on a comics messageboard to order this "ashcan" edition of CHROME FETUS #5 to help fund a properly printed edition. Even though that plan fell by the wayside, by CHristmas time there was a brand new book in my hands - put there while standing in Million Year Picninc by Rickheit himself, who was appreciative of my continued coverage and defense of his work. A color cover and over thirty pages of work left me to think that this had to be the final version and not some incomplete ashcan. But the website later confirmed that the book I write of now is merely an unfinished fragment od whatever Rickheit's final, unstated vision is. At on point, i thought his work trickled down slowly enough that i wouldn't have to cover him for at least one TCI issue, and I could possibly shake the image of being his unauthorized, unpais biographer. However, as things stand now, between his illustrative work for the Cambridge's Zeitgeist Gallery (with the Cambridge Comix Festival now under his belt) and his ongoing strips, Rickheit has become more prolific with each passing year, producing work that has always been worthy of attention. All the more reason to loathe the fact no comics publisher has yet stepped in to help produce it. The back cover info introduces this issue as "Chrome Fetus For Beginners," which is a curious statement, as each issue to date has introduced a change in Rickheit's style or direction not entirely visible unless read in succession, almost acting as seques to his longer or more realized works like CHLOE, KILL KILL KILL and SIGMUND FREUD. Though CHROME FETUS for Rickheit has always been a vehicle for his "UnderBrain" ideas rather than any easily recognisable narrative device, I find it to be no coincidence that CHROME FETUS' narrative experiments (first seen in PAPER RODEO) started to really find their niche around the same time Rickheit published (pre-xeric award edition) his most successful long narrative work with CHLOE. With #5, I am left wondering if any of the strips are but fragments of more realized works, or shades of things to come in stories still forming in Rickheit's head. I believe we can rule out his ten page "Meander" strip, which features an autobiographical stand-in that actually looks like Rickheit. i exclude this as a prologue to a longer work mostly because he told me at MYP that he would never draw his own image like that again, but also because it's the same typ of dream-like story represented in PAPER RODEO with his bear-faced character (featured very sparingly this time around). The most likely candidate is the "Cochlea & Eustachia" strip,a story whose main characters grace both the 5th issues's cover and the TCI issue featuring the artist. This is encouraging, as the story feature the somewhat familiar world Hans' characters inhabit, almost made more accessible through the curious and wordy childlike females. [paragraph postscrpt: I wrote all this even before the two girls recently appeared in Rickheit's recent feature in THE STRANGER.] Any minor disappointment I have stems from the symbolism Rickheit uses, which seems to be more dominantly Freudian, therefore more easily identifiable. Though it makes the story more understandable on one level, Rickheit is most interesting when he uses image sthat seem sexual but which no one would admit to right away. Rickheit's best images as a whole are rendered as such to make it impossible to interpret it withou revealing something about the way we think. Still, with the still lingering promise of a longer narrative vaguely hinted in this ashcan, it will be a hard sell to all but the most diehard of Rickheit fans. My constant question is: Why aren't there more of them? Though his drawing is not near the elvel of Robert Crumb's, he is tyhe most likely successor to Crumb in his ability to relentlessly pursue his obsessions, however unmarketable, personal, unknown and traceable (or even unspeakable) to most of us.
From REVIEWER MAGAZINE Review by Robert Shamlin Hans Rickheit's is the very best I've seen on the technical level of drafting skill ans on the story board side of its irresistably engrossing sequence of panels. Obviously classically trained, Rickheit uses both beauty and ugliness to draw the viewer/reader into a prinal level (referred to as the UnderBrain) of thinking about our modern world. In Chrome Fetus #5 RIckheit's recurring charcter whom I'll call the Teddy Bear -Headed Gentleman (who is often clothed in an aviator officer's longcoat, scarf and boots) applies an adjusting screwdriver to a mutant with a chickenhead on a table; a goateed guy with a shaved head wanders through a mountainous landscape before launching and boarding a rabbit blimp that contains a strange urban subway interior; two vixen girl twins "Cochlea & Eustachia" are stalked by a scary fish-head/man. There's other features too, and an even wider range of subjects and subtle matinee sideshows in Chrome Fetus #4. Rickheit is an artist just beginning to scratch the surface of our subconscious and his talent is revealing its dark secrets.
CHLOE The Comics Journal: Review by Ng Suat Yong Chloe is the cigar-chomping protagonist of this Xeric grant-winning graphic novel; a disconnected, rebellious high school studant who spends her time playing truant and escaping the slightly suspicious affections of her father. Like her namesake of Greek myth, Chloe appears, initially, to have no grasp of love or sex (this despite being surrounded by symbolic male organs). She retrieves these emotions from her uncouth, dwarven neighbor, Conrad. Conrad is her Daphne (a goatherd by tradition) and is as twisted and unhealthy as the maligned goat which Chlo spies skirting away fro her early on in the book, rudely displaying his genitals to her in so doing. At one point in Rickheit's book, Conrad brazenly remarks, "I only do what the UnderBrain instructs me to do." In so saying, he reveals Rickheit's deeper machinations and his allusions to a primitive division of the human brain controlling emotions, sex, and anger. The longer Chloe stays in contact with her dwarven "goatherd" (her satyr, her Pan-like demi-god), the further she drifts into honed brutality. Where once she meekly complied with the bullies in her school, a later attempted rape prompts actions revoling around her instincts of fight and flight, resulting in severe injuries to her would-be assailant. When Chloe is forced to undergo some corrective electro-convulsive therapy as a result of this misdemeanor, she seems almost detached and indifferent to her predicament. he is, after all, controlled by her primal instincts and not her electrically rearranged higher functions. As a result, Chloe's mind persistently conjures up memories and daydreams despite her period of therapy. Chloe is motherless and the presence of convoluted avenues of rebirth toward the end of Rickheit's book and of white cats sprouting from both Conrad's and Chloe's bodies seem like throwbacks to Bonapartian psychoanalytic theory, where Poe's catacombs and cats become transformed into elements of a missing maternal figure and womanly portals. The denouement of this intense exploration of the feral mind traverses the indecipherable corridors of hallucinations and nightmares. Rickheit's first graphic novel has a surface sheen of empty repulsiveness and shock. Yet these elments of distress are firmly lodged in an intelligent conception and are born of stringent planning on the part of its author. There ae some unwelcome difficulties in his artistry. His incessant use of an unsophisticated cross-hatching inking technique, for example, lends a certain unwelcome predictability to each panel; a predictability which gives way to a more varied miasma of organic forms characterized by sinuous, complex forms and judiciously defined blacks toward the close of the book. But it is the probing mind found in the dark recesses of CHLOE that I find most attractive and the book is a promising step in the right direction for its young author. Review by Matt Fraction This is going to be one of those ARTBOMB reviews about reviews. When the Xeric Grant winning-CHLOE was released, I got an email from ARTBOMB Poobah Peter Siegel asking if I'd heard anything about it. "I guess it's the first Xeric book to be Adults Only," he mentioned, which in my experience always serves as a homing beacon to Peter. I hadn't heard a thing about it, and didn't think anything else about CHLOE until he wrote me back a few days later to tell me he'd picked the book up. "It's probably the most disturbing comic I've ever read," Peter said. Now, this means two things: one - if it's not only Disturbing, but Most Disturbing to Peter... then CHLOE must be pretty goddamned disturbing indeed. Secondly, as a result, this meant that I, too, now wanted to read CHLOE. So I read CHLOE. The semantics of what exactly we mean when we say 'recommend' may be worth addressing here. I liked CHLOE, but I have no idea what the hell it is. There is the barest hint of narrative scattered throughout that never quite seems to add up to anything quantifiably logical, at least to me; then again, I've never been noted as the sharpest tool in the shed. I don't think CHLOE is about its story, though. CHLOE is about the trans-substantiation of the sexual viscera of its content into a palpable, physical reaction into its readers, something more than merely shocking for shocking's sake. Recalling both the stark, controlled nightmares of Al Columbia and the gonzo repulsive sexuality of Dave Cooper, Hans Rickheit has trolled his id and purged it on the page. And whether you're turned on, grossed out, or possibly both - THAT, dear reader, seems to be what CHLOE is all about. And, I don't know, I laughed an awful lot, too. Equal parts sexual, pornographic, terrifying, and nauseating, CHLOE is a stomachache on paper. Review by Robert Young Hans Rickheit's Xeric-funded book CHLOE is an oddly engrossing read that, unlike many of his past works, is reasonably coherent and thankfully relies a little less heavily on stomach-turning juxtapositions of sex, violence and bestial mutations. Which isn't to say that all are not still present in the eerie dosages that make reading Rickheit a reliably queasy experience. Chloe is a raven-haired, freckle-faced seventeen-year-old with an overprotective father who is nonetheless helpless (and clueless) regarding the bullying and borderline molestation she routinely suffers at the hands of a trio of moronic male students. That Chloe smokes cigars is an idiosyncratic piece of characterisation. Knowing about the book's sexual content, I initially suspect that Rickheit had used cigars rather than cigarettes because the thickness of the former made for the more obvious phallic imagery when stuck in Chloe's mouth. Any doubts I may have had about this theory were dispelled early on when Chloe steals a box of cigars from a store cache that includes the brand names "Phallus Blunts" and "Fellatio Blunts", alongside the less sexually provocative brands "Injun" and "Lungpal". While searching for her missing dog, Chloe wanders into a field where a number of barred, rectangular boxes stand. They appear to be cages or traps of some sort, but given that Chloe discovers a cocooned, embryonic creature in one, they may be incubators or housing. Soon enough she comes across the home of the hermitic dwarf who harvests the fleshy creatures. It only gets more strange from there, as Chloe engages in a disturbing relationship with the dwarf that progresses even after she discovers her beheaded pet dog in his home. Soon enough, any semblance of reality gives way to a nightmarish milieu of hallucinogenic scenes and images that defy description other than to be tagged as uniquely Rickheitian. (It's a plane in which the nearest neighbours must be Renee French and Troy Nixey.) Rickheit is a talented draftsman who handles human figures, animals, inanimate objects, and the nightmarish mutations that frequent almost all of his works with equal aplomb. He's also a natural storyteller, intuitively changing angles to maintain a visual flow, using perspective to set moods, and smartly shifting scenes to sustain his chosen pace. However, Rickheit's dialogue is a bit stilted, with Chloe's dad and her trio of bullies sounding like one-dimensional caricatures, while her trollish lover in the woods like some cross between an English dandy and an imperious supervillain. "Accursed beasts", "Damn pariahs! Won't you leave me in peace?" is how he addresses his cats. The "idiot offspring of apes and fools" is how he describes the world at large. Of course when he mentions his adherence to the teachings of the "UnderBrain" (loosely speaking, a sort of collective unconsciousness with a stormy temperament) it sounds as if the dwarf shares some commonalties with Rickheit himself, considering the artist's own allegiance to that obscure philosophy. When the dwarf says, "Forgive me. I can be a bit vague at times", it sounds as if Rickheit is speaking directly to his readers. Of the small cast of characters in CHLOE, only the reticent lead speaks like a "normal" person. But this may be a conscious decision on Rickheit's part, for Chloe is also the only character Rickheit has given pupils (most of the time). Otherwise, all of the supporting cast are drawn with the same empty, pupil-free eyes that suggests either Chloe's emotional detachment from them, or perhaps their own detachment from the world. Certainly Chloe would have reason to affect a sort of emotional autopilot when interacting with others. Her father is strict, demeaning and possessive; the bullies are sexually conflicted brutes; her psychiatrist is predictably stoic and condescending; and her dwarf lover is cruel to animals and blatantly manipulative of Chloe. Having previously recognised the potential in Rickheit's work, even as I was all too often repulsed by the content, I find CHLOE to be his most accessible comic yet (other than the deft Kirby parody of his SIGMUND FREUD mini). But given that CHLOE is a play on prior Rickheit themes and still rife with grotesques, it may be that I'm simply becoming inured to the artist's work. At this pivotal stage in his career, Rickheit's greatest strength - the uniqueness of his vision - may, oddly enough, also be his great weakness. The reason being that, given his obsessive Underbrain mantra, and the images and themes that always seem to be present in his work, Rickheit is in danger of endlessly repeating himself (albeit in fascinating new ways). Any obsessing in CHLOE is forgivable, since this is Rickheit's first properly published work, and often minicomics artists all but compile past works and themes when finally offered a larger forum. But given the sneak peeks of Rickheit's forthcoming CHROME FETUS #5, many of the signposts already look familiar, even as the otherworldly aesthetic remains as hypnotic as ever. Nonetheless, CHLOE is Rickheit's most fully realised work to date, and the title character is perhaps the most believable and sympathetic Rickheit has yet created. For all those who have yet to experience Hans Rickheit's startlingly unique work, this is the best possible jumping on point. Just buckle up firmly, and take a big handful of Dramamine, because it's going to be a very strange trip. |