“The Auteur” is extremely vulgar, filled to the brim with madness, and totally great. Watch captivated, as I try to explain the unexplainable, after the break.
Written by Rick Spears
Illustrated by James Callahan
Colors by Luigi AndersonFresh off the biggest bomb in Hollywood history, disgraced and desperate producer Nathan T. Rex enters a downward spiral of drugs and depravity in a quest to resurrect his career and save his soul. Over budget and behind schedule on the latest installment of the horror franchise, PRESIDENTS DAY, T. Rex is backed into a corner by bad publicity, a crap project, and a jerk studio exec, but finds salvation at a strip club by huffing glue, and a chance encounter with cable news. Welcome to the most deranged, notorious, and hilarious comic of 2014! We apologize in advance.
The cover of “The Auteur” features a man mock-framing a movie scene as his eye explodes through his imaginary camera, background littered with Ben-Day dots. On the variant, a busty Stan Lee bursts from the tormented director’s exploding mind. That’s this comic, in a nutshell – and what a nutty nutshell it is. I’ll try to explain why this comic is so crazy good and wholly original without giving too much away. On the one hand, the book deserves more exposure than it’s going to get. On the other hand, I can tell you that either of these covers tell you what you need to know as to whether you’ll want this book or not.
“The Auteur” is the story of desperate failure and a mad, drug-fueled grab for redemption. Lead character Nathan T. Rex produced one of the biggest, most expensive bombs in motion picture history, “Cosmos” – a vast sci-fi fantasy epic resembling Masters of the Universe. This bomb has driven Rex to a scrambling search for meaning and success in his own life, on a more personal level. More prominently, it’s lead him to bouts of part-time insanity. The scrappy, visually-scraggly Nathan Rex is a character who has not given us reason to like him yet, but one who is fun to watch become unhinged.
Rex begins the comic on a vision quest – as you probably would after a most public and prominent embarrassment. Along the way, he rejects the notion of genre films as trash and the very sort of thing that lead to his ultimate unhappiness. Nonetheless, he’s found himself back in the producer’s chair on a horror film that has him clawing at any opportunity to become relevant again. To get his pure manic creative vision onto a movie screen, even if he needs drug trips curated by “Dr. Love” and epiphanies at heavily church-themed strip clubs to do so.
The straight story is compelling in the mad desperation of its lead, but the surrealism around the periphery is the true key to the greatness of “The Auteur.” Drug trips are opportunities to experiment with extreme detail, unbelievable body horror, and detours into the first-person-perspective of a desperate mad man. In this way, “The Auteur” has plenty of satire to it, finding ways to poke fun at the wacky excess of B-level Hollywood even while embracing those violent, vulgar traits in its form.
It’s hard to imagine James Callahan pushing this subject matter any further with his art than he does already. The eye-popping image on the front of the comic is only a taste of the sort of hyper-detail and gleefully manic grotesqueries that lie between the covers. Callahan makes a strong argument for nihilistic violence over the humorless and grim violence that gets peddled in the average DC or Marvel comic these days. In fact, those mainstream comics would be right at home as targets of Rex’s disdain in the opening moments of the comics. Where something like “Forever Evil” makes violent acts seem routine, Callahan turns them into comically surreal eureka moments. Jesus, does that make sense?
Surrealism is the order of the day in “The Auteur”, whether it’s in one of the aforementioned drug trips, or an unhinged tantrum sparked by failure. Callahan experiments with perspective, subtle visual gags, and Darrow-esque excess in every sequence. I can’t say enough about the artistic approach of Callahan, which is a brilliant marriage of scripted insanity mixed with little touches that only a great artist can give you. Colorist Luigi Anderson experiment with impossible color schemes in trip sequences that are aesthetically pleasing, even while queasy stuff is going on. On the whole, Anderson’s colors are vibrant, adding to the daffy feel of the whole affair.
We endlessly praised “Shaolin Cowboy” earlier this year for its artistically studious and indulgent approach to staging a hyper violent fight sequence with great detail, humor, and vitality. “The Auteur” carries that same spirit with it, though much more is thrown at the wall. While “Shaolin Cowboy” was delivering basically one thing, in a variety of ways, “The Auteur” is grabbing stuff from every corner of its creators’ unwieldily minds to entertain you. “The Auteur” is perfect for fans of entirely original, entirely uninhibited, independently minded comics that play by their own rules and nobody else’s.
Final Verdict: 9.5 – Buy
