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HEY, MISTER THE FALL COLLECTION
Highly Recommended (10/10)
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Top Shelf Productions
Writer/Artist: Pete Sickman-Garner
Price: $12.95 US |
Hey, Mister is a little difficult to describe, but the word I keep coming back to is hilarious. The other word is twisted, and that fits it just fine too. Hey, Mister is a strange mix,
in which the creator sometimes directly addresses the audience or his creations,
and those creations live in a strange sort of continuity where some things are
constant (their relationships, mostly) but their situations are ever-changing.
In this collection, Sickman-Garner uses the grumpy Aunt Mary, the dour Mister
and the cheerful but strange Tim to examine the nature of God (and gods), the
inner workings of bureaucracy and Western society and the little niggling
details that make life such a pain in the ass some days. Though he's taking on
weighty matters, he does it with a sense of humor and a "nothing is sacred"
approach that I think anyone would find amazingly funny.
Sickman-Garner's work has some
of the same edge and thumbing his nose at society as folks like Tom Green or
Johnny Knoxville, except that it's actually edgy rather than just being stupid
and it's actually funny rather than just thinking it's funny. Mister and the
rest of the crew engage in such antisocial behavior as filling a trunk with
concrete and causing folks to crash into them, giving a hard time to someone who
won't talk to them or mocking those with a conservative political bent.
In amidst the goofy and sometimes surreal work in Hey, Mister, though, this
collection contains some storylines that are actually more long-running. While
short strips such as Mister and Tim demonstrating the "Do your balls hang low?"
song in excruciatingly disturbing detail or a hunt for Tom Hanks with a
surprising and amusing ending are certainly fun, I found a lot of enjoyment in
the actual stories this issue. For example: Tim, the somewhat clueless (but
cheerful) loser of the group befriends Jesus and helps him orchestrate his
second coming, all within the confines of a corporate environment. Not only is
the idea sheer brilliance, the execution is often funny but has an inner core
that examines religious faith, big business and the basic ideas of friendship.
On top of the standout story
of the book, the "Trouble with Jesus," I also really enjoyed the other two
extended storylines. One finds Mister transformed into a love machine courtesy
of Hera, and then carted around Olympus, in a story that starts with the
always-fun cliche of "Gods make bet on a mortal" and then twists that cliche
into ridiculous shapes. The other is a twisted look at "Jack and the Beanstalk"
in which our trio discover another treasure the giant was hiding, a pig that
pisses whiskey. Well, sort of... but I don't want to give away the punchline.
Between the segments of Hey, Mister that are reprinted here, we have Sickman-Garner addressing his readers directly, telling us how the folks at Top Shelf are putting the pressure on. In one particularly amusing sequence, fictional versions of publishers Staros and Warnock come to complain that Hey, Mister is not the wall-to-wall pornography they were promised. However, it's clear to anyone reading the book that these sequences are as fictional as the rest of the book, because it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't be thrilled with the contents of Hey, Mister. After all, when the
book isn't laugh-out-loud funny, it's thought-provoking or mildly disturbing,
and it's certainly never boring.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review, or discuss it on the Fourth Rail message board. |
