Hicksville
I saw this on BoingBoing today:
Dick Burger has been hailed by fandom as the greatest comic book creator since Jack Kirby. Unlike Kirby, however, Burger retained ownership of his characters and became a media tycoon, complete with a private jet furnished with a hot tub and a mansion in Los Angeles. He is also an insufferable bastard.
Leonard Bates is a North American journalist who is conducting research for a biography of Burger. When he travels to Hicksville, New Zealand to visit Burger’s childhood home, he discovers that no one in the village wants to talk to him about Burger. For reasons unknown to Bates, they are downright angry at him for even mentioning his name. They are delighted, however, to give Bates access to the town library, which contains the greatest comic book collection on the face of the earth (including several copies of Action #1 which they casually pull from the shelves). It turns out that everyone in the village is connoisseur of comics and they’d all read Bates’ earlier biography of Kirby. What is going in here? wonders Bates, and what’s the big mystery about Burger?
It sounds fascinating to me. I do enjoy more “real” comics, in addition to the standard superhero fare. Joe Sacco is probably my favorite non-fiction writer (check out Palestine and The Fixer, and Ryan Claytor (now a fellow Michigan resident) has done some cool autobiographical stuff, as well as a wonderful, sad piece called The Machinist.
My expectation is that Hicksville is a bit of that kind of tone – obviously fiction, but much more real-world than the typical comic book – melded with a bit of meta-awareness.
I’m going to hunt this one down.




