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Friday Recommendation: Hewligan’s Haircut

By | April 22nd, 2011
Posted in Columns | % Comments

Everyone else already took the big-name good ones, so let’s jaunt over to the UK and poke into a dark day-glo corner of things. After the jump, that is — we can’t get ahead of ourselves.


I’ve only fleetingly kept up on 2000 AD the past couple of years, but man, that book’s history is littered with so many gems that it’s really a shame how it’s never seemed to take off in America. Classic 2000 AD often took American trends — superheroes and politics in Judge Dredd, cowboys and dinosaurs in Flesh, Clint Eastwood and the Cold War in Invasion — and stretched them like a drum to be properly beaten. Maybe it’s because the more grim, fatalistic aspects of British black humo(u)r just aren’t as easily digested as, say, a sugar-sweet and high-blood-pressured Japanese riff on American culture. Maybe it’s because America already has superheroes and Clint Eastwood and cowboys, so who needs a version that pointedly takes the piss? Whatever the reason, it means that some of the finest work in the history of the UK comics scene — which gave us pretty much every key comic-book innovator except Frank Miller, Todd MacFarlane and Dave Sim for a good decade or so — has been criminally underseen stateside, even when one of the creators has had a long career working on American properties and the other has co-conceived a gazillion-selling real fake real pop band.

I read a lot of books about music. Whenever the writer is a vinyl junkie — because there are two kinds, vinyl junkies and people who don’t care about vinyl records at all — it’s obvious, because usually they can’t stop themselves from gushing about some pheonomenal deal they got, or some obscuro super-score that pure luck and maybe a Greek goddess dropped into their lap when they were combing a church-basement milk-crate kind of deal. I’m so sick of those stories. So there I was, in Newbury Comics in Newton, Mass., looking through the TPB shelves back when they were a bit more crammed than they usually are now, and more given to being full of weird stuff that had been gathering dust for years. My eyes scan over the hardcovers and start to glaze and then suddenly, my attention was seized. There it was, sitting in front of me, on discount no less — a little banged up but I don’t care about that. Hewligan’s Haircut in its proper size, with a nice hard spine and a lovely, manic cover. Maybe my second favorite comic ever. I didn’t even hesitate — I just grabbed it so quickly that I might as well have set the damn thing on fire from speed friction.


I don’t really remember how I first read Hewligan’s Haircut; it almost doesn’t seem to matter, as such a strange work seems better remembered as just having inserted itself into my life like a computer virus. I know I had a copy from the internet but we’re a civilized site and we don’t talk about that here. I just know that as soon as I read it, I was like “this is what comics should be.” The only thing I know for sure that I love more is Kill Your Boyfriend, which maybe I’ll write about some other time if some jerk doesn’t beat me to it. Still, Hewligan’s Haircut is, something like nine hundred years after its original publication, fantastically unlike nearly anything that’s been put out since. Peter Milligan is at his unhinged peak, writing a story that careens from non-sequitur to non-sequitur as we deal with young Hewligan facing the question we’ve all got to own up to at some point or another: “Am I crazy, or are everyone else in the world the insane ones?”


Art comes from a young lad you may have heard of called Jamie Hewlett. This was after Tank Girl but some years before the dawn of Gorillaz. His art on Hewligan’s Haircut has neither the careful, slick line of his Gorillaz art, nor the vivid painted colors of his later (and even more obscure) strip Get the Freebies. Instead, it’s just kind of muddy and day-glo at the same time, as if he kept spilling radioactive coffee on the pages. To bring it back to music for a minute, his art here is like Michael Clarke’s drumming for the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers — not always on the beat, often sloppy, sometimes distractingly so, but you can tell he’s having a blast and you can’t imagine the songs differently. Hewlett was still coming into his own, and his work here is maybe not as confident in its willful strangeness as Get the Freebies, covering its insecurity with moment after moment of pure fourth-wall-breaking cheek. But hell if the art doesn’t have personality, more integral to a work like this than anything else. Just look at the examples I’m littering this stupid article with.

Continued below

Peter Milligan often gets upbraided for his superhero work for the big publishers, and usually rightfully so. He brings weird ideas to the table but never quite sticks the landing, as on X-Men, where his deadpan absurdism and poker-faced taunting of X-Cliches mingled too awkwardly with the actual superheroics and left the whole thing feeling hollow and insincere. (Let’s not even mention Elektra, although it at least gave us the foundation of his fascination with Razorfist, a Milligan-y villain if there ever was one.) No one should dismiss him before reading his work for Vertigo, though, and those still thinking of giving him a pass need to track down the real treasure: the stuff he did for 2000 AD and Revolver in the UK. Bad Company, Sooner or Later, Rogan Gosh, and, yes, Hewligan’s Haircut. If weird ideas and lateral thought are the strengths on which we pride Morrison, Hickman, Fraction, et al., then Milligan is their secret patron saint, because no one’s weirder or more lateral.

The story goes that Grant Morrison wrote his unjustly forgotten strip Really and Truly (with Rian Hughes) in one sitting after experimenting with ecstasy. Hewligan’s Haircut makes that strip look sober and pedestrian. Ideas are spat out with an insouciant lack of restraint, and Hewligan and his lady companion Scarlet O’Gasmeter hurtle through the story less like intrepid heroes and more like bandit hurricanes. They don’t interact with the plot, they crash through it in a breathless rush, like the Louvre scene in Bande à Part, proposing a question that could alter the nature of human existence if true and then running like hell from any kind of answer. The typical sci-fi strip would seek to salve madness with reason, to wrap things up with a bow and present the narrative to the reader, dripping in mock-profundity for its typically tame go at rubbing your face in a bit of freshman philosophy.


Not here. Not in Hewligan’s Haircut. Twisting itself into loops and screaming through space, dopesick for mental health and yet unable to keep from trying to kick, it’s a comic whose playful aggression and evasiveness mask a very real, very sweet core. Where most comics have something to say about responsibility — of the individual, of the government, of the corporation, of the deity — this one seems more to talk about love, and to talk about love in its own language. Things might not make sense, but in this arena, that’s okay. No one ever said they had to, as long as you feel it.

So find a copy for yourself and feel it too.


//TAGS | Friday Recommendation

Patrick Tobin

Patrick Tobin (American) is likely shaming his journalism professors from the University of Glasgow by writing about comic books. Luckily, he's also written about film for The Drouth and The Directory of World Cinema: Great Britain. He can be reached via e-mail right here.

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