Some comics try and redefine the medium by pushing boundaries and throwing their characters into impossibly tragic experiences just to see how they come out on the other end. Other comics aim to intentionally not break the mold and work within the conventions of the medium to tell a story the way they’ve always been told. However, on rare occasions, you get a comic that just doesn’t give a damn and does whatever the hell it wants into a story that becomes truly unique. Black Heart Billy is one of these stories. One of the earliest works of graphic fiction to spawn into publication by Rick Remender, BHB functions as a love letter to Remender’s youth as a skater kid that loved punk rock and he (along with fellow writer/artists Kieron Dwyer and Harper Jaten), managed to create the comic book equivalent of an old Minor Threat seven inch that can be enjoyed even by those unfamiliar with the source material.
The publication history of this book was pretty erratic over the course of its 8 chapter history (I would say “issue” history, but some chapters are only three or four pages long), hence reading the collected edition takes a few reads to place everything into context properly. You see, the first three stories were initially written and created independently by Remender and Dwyer while the remainder were created for inclusion in the Fat Wreck Chords zine/catalogue (hence, making them much shorter and rife with NoFX references.)
The first story as well as the last story of the 8 stand out as my favorites though, so while I could break down the tales of BHB harnessing the power of the stage dive to save the day (and getting tons of free merch as a result), learning proper public toilet etiquette, tripping on psychedelic beer and going on a rampage in search of a recording contract and Celine Dion tickets, selling out and joining a punk rock boy band and even fighting cyber nerds in post-apocalyptia, I’m going to instead focus only on stories 1 and 8.
The first story, to me, stands out as the most archetypal of the 8. While all of them certainly indulge in the cultural, intellectual and creative freedom of punk rock, I feel that this first one creates the tightest actual story with a beginning, middle and end of the whole bunch, and it opens with Billy beating some hippies with the skull of Jerry Garcia (wielded primarily like a certain thunder god wields a certain hardware tool). He then proceeds to go about his day as most So-Cal punks in the 80s and 90s did (AKA not doing a whole hell of a lot other than skate and listen to records), but still manages to put the fear of God into some youthful Christians. Its at this point that we learn that not only was Jerry Garcia was a genetic successor to Adolf Hitler and that secret Nazi senior citizens had created a robot body for the unearthed Garcia head that BHB had used as a blunt object two scenes prior. Of course, this robot body used hydraulics from the haunted car of former NWA member Easy E, which resulted in the creation of the stories Big Bad, Deadhead.
It was then that BHB was tasked with the destruction of Deadhead in order to stop him from turning everyone into the world into dirty hippies and white boy gangsters (and Kenny G fans), which he does with the help of an old Journey 8-Track. It’s at this point that I began to fully understand what I could expect from Black Heart Billy: insane scenarios combining elements of everything I enjoy and hold dear about music, erratic characters with heart and soul (however mangled they may be), Nazi/Hippy bashing and boatloads of appropriate cultural references injected into my favorite medium for absorbing stories. Simply put, the fact that this story existed, and in comic book form no less, just brought a smile to my face and turned a Remender fan into an even bigger Remender fan.
However, Story #8 of the book is, by an unbelievably wide margin, the most personal of them all. While it’s not my place to really form commentary on a story about Remender (taking the form of BHB) meeting his wife (or at least I assume that’s what was going on), I will say that this type of utterly candid but still tough as nails writing style is what made Rick Remender one of my creative inspirations and taking it in in such an early, nascent form was a legitimately great experience.
Overall, while I’m sure Black Heart Billy CAN be enjoyed by readers that don’t necessarily understand every reference and the blatant (sub)cultural nuance of the book, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that for those that WOULD it is a must read. So if you’ve ever walked down the street and wanted to punch a poseur hippy kid in the mouth, gotten really drunk at a show and met the love of your life, wondered why society is filled with assholes or even just listened to a NoFX record more than once (or own The Decline on vinyl), then you’ll probably enjoy this sucker quite a bit.