We need to talk about Hans Rickheit

Peverse delight
By S.I. ROSENBAUM  |  June 15, 2012

main_Folly_480wide
HE CAN'T HELP IT Even if Rickheit's characters aren't doing anything explicit, you know that what's going on can't possibly be innocent.

I want to have sex with Hans Rickheit. And not just because he once made an autobio comic about autofellatio (isn't that all autobio comics, though, really?). Rather, it's the determined deviance of his works that makes me think he'd be really . . . interesting. . . in bed. Though I might have to ask him not to bring any preserved pig fetuses.

I've been reading Rickheit's comics since the '90s, when they first appeared in Paper Rodeo, the anarchic comix rag published by the late, great Fort Thunder arts collective in Providence. Paper Rodeo was filled with the deeply disturbed, even unmedicated brain droppings of artists like Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, but even so, Rickheit's work stood out. There was something compelling about that bear-faced man slipping into wood-paneled houses only to be confronted with fleshy coin-op chimeras that functioned as pipe organs. Many of the works published in Paper Rodeo back in the day were comics only in the broadest sense of the term — really more like manic scribbles filling the pages — but Rickheit's had all the comics paraphanalia of panels and gutters and sequential progression, which just made them more strange and unsettling.

Rickheit went on to publish two graphic novels, Chloe and The Squirrel Machine, and he's serializing a third, Ectopiary, online. But he has also just released a compendium of his early and uncollected comics in a single disturbing volume from Fantagraphics: Folly. Subtitled "The Consequences of Indiscretion," this book reminded me of why I was instantly fascinated with Rickheit's comics. Here again are the monsters in curio cabinets, the perverted dwarves, the twin masked nymphets fingering each other, that I first fell for.

These comics aren't all that pornographic, but there is a sexuality seeping from everything he draws, more horrifying for its coy implications. It's like that one scene from The Shining with the two furries in the hotel room: they're not doing anything explicit, but by God there's nothing innocent that could possibly be going on there.

main2_Folly_book220
By happenstance, Folly arrived on my desk along with the latest installment of another cartoonist's foray in the realms of the unreal: The Hive, the second chapter (due out in October from Pantheon) of the hallucinatory saga Charles Burns began with X'd Out. There's a lot in Burns's work that seems to tread the same Cronenbergian territory as Folly: mutated human-like food products, slimy organic machinery, etc. But compared to Rickheit's oeuvre, the perversity in The Hive feels forced. Burns is at his best when he's using the grotesque as a metaphor for the real, as in Black Hole, his high-school mutant-noir novel. In The Hive, it's not clear yet what metaphorical target Burns is aiming at.

On the other hand, Rickheit's jointed tentacled biomasses, nestled in their grooved Victorian devices, never seem like a metaphor for anything. They just are.

It's as if other masters of visual bodyhorror — Cronenberg, Burns, Dan Clowes, Tarsem Singh — are weird by choice. Rickheit, it seems, just can't help it. There's a conviction to his creepiness, a compulsive nature even in his early draftsmanship (his current drawings, in their architectural perfection, resemble those of a savant). His work seems completely, horrifyingly honest.

I met Rickheit once, and he was a perfectly pleasant, if shy, fellow. Nonetheless, I can't help wondering what it would be like to get down with a brain that straightforwardly subversive.

Maybe I'd even let him bring the pig fetuses. You never know.

  Topics: Books , Books, Graphic Novels, Hans Rickheit,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY S.I. ROSENBAUM
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   COMMUNITY’S STATE OF PLAY  |  February 05, 2013
    By the time you read this, NBC's brilliant, neglected stepchild of a sitcom will back on the air, having survived its creator's firing, various scheduling debacles, and the epic flouncing-off of Chevy Chase.
  •   BEAUTY AND THE GEEK  |  November 08, 2012
    Geek is now chic, and the Internet is filled with female makeup artists who draw inspiration from superhero comics, video games, and science fiction.
  •   KILLING WITH KINDNESS: WHY THE DEATH WITH DIGNITY ACT ENDANGERS PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES  |  November 05, 2012
    I think my opinions about doctor-assisted suicide crystallized the night Mike — my wheelchair-using, ventilator-breathing boyfriend — choked on pineapple juice, passed out, and died.
  •   THE JOY OF SMUT  |  October 17, 2012
    The porn here is explicit, character-driven, and polymorphically perverse.
  •   CELEBRATING ROMAN TOTENBERG  |  October 09, 2012
    When not reporting on the Supreme Court for NPR, Nina Totenberg has spent the last few months working with her two sisters to plan a memorial for her father, Roman.

 See all articles by: S.I. ROSENBAUM