Page 45 Review by Jonathan
"Awesome how much privacy we get in this house."
"Uushuaptt!"
"What?"
SPIT.
"I said shut up you big baby."
"Weird... I got three gray hairs."
"My dad was gray by the time he was thirty..."
"I'm only twenty-seven!"
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!"
"Sigh. He's up."
"EEGAH! What kind of kid is this? He wakes up at 4.30 for an hour then naps for forty-five minutes? He's cursed."
"It's your turn."
"No, yours!"
"WWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!"
"Shit."
The first thing you notice with CRICKETS #3 is that, in a sense, it's almost completely in reverse. Not in a manga right-to-left way, but the first page is actually a letters or more precisely letter page, also featuring an obituary of sorts to "Good Cartoonists Gone" with a thumbnail of which publication they were last seen in and when. Also, a brief gag strip. The letter is actually quite hilarious, from someone who seems to have had his mind blown by CRICKETS #2 and went from wanting to rip it up after the first read ("What the hell is wrong with this book? Why does it exist? Where did it come from? Whose fucking depths of subconscious were plunged to create something like this?")... to absolutely worshipping it after a second subsequent read... ("I love this book now. It has confounded me, eluded my every attempt to understand, to even classify it as a traditional narrative. I don't know what in the name of Christ it actually is... I probably never will.").
Then we have two supplementary strips, firstly an excellent four-pager about a philandering professor, and then a one-pager about Sammy meeting fellow comics creator Frank S. Santoro, before we finally get to the main forty-two page story. Seems a strange way to me to go about laying out a comic, but who am I to argue with Mr. Harkham, the editor of arguably the most avant-garde comics anthology series in KRAMER'S ERGOT, volume 7 of which was so large it had to be hand-bound... and also required a bin bag to carry it in. Good grief, the man even persuaded Chris Ware to write a happy ending!! Well, sort of. There are rumours that volume 8, which I'm neither going to confirm nor deny starting, will come with fold-out legs to double as the world's first true coffee-table book...
Hmm, I seem to be digressing like Ronnie Corbett on speed now, so I'd better get back to the review of the main story, which is entitled Blood Of The Virgin and features Seymour who works for the mildly odious Val Reed, owner of Reverie Inter Films, making very, very low-budget horror films indeed. There's the first neat flourish of many as Sammy works the story-title splash-panel, featuring the film title, into the third page of the story, exactly as it would appear to a cinema-goer.
Seymour longs to be allowed to direct a film, any film, but deep down he knows Val's promises of a bright future are hollow, and he's going to be stuck splicing together bits of ad hoc footage for some time to come unless something drastic changes. Meanwhile his first child, born a fervent insomniac it would appear, seems to be causing friction aplenty in the marital household. Consequently relations are a little strained between Seymour and his wife, but that still doesn't excuse his somewhat laissez-faire approach to his marriage vows. He has an eye for the ladies and it would seem at least one or two of them have an eye for him, despite his rather dodgy moustache. Still, it is 1973's L.A. so I guess we can forgive him that, if nothing else.
CRICKETS is absolutely everything outstanding contemporary fiction should be: completely believable characters with understandable motivations, and also the situations that bring out the best and worst in them. And in the hands of a great writer like Sammy, all he needs is the everyday and indeed outright banality of a life (just a little bit) less lived and unfulfilled in Seymour, which is redolent of much of the world population's I'm sure, to create a riveting story. Plus he artfully weaves in little frissons of the bitchiness and seediness of the movie world, particularly on its rather tattered fringes where Seymour operates. After all, horror this low-grade is barely one step up from porn in the cinematic pecking order.
I really like Sammy's art style which reminds me in places of Chester Brown and also Daniel Clowes with its warmth and ever so slightly cartoonish aspect, particularly visible in people's features. It demonstrates that you really don't need that much detail to express every conceivable emotion. LOUIS RIEL in particular sprang to mind as a comparison with Chester Brown. He also masterfully shows other elements of compositional technique such as how changing the size of panels over a two-page sequence can really add an extra layer to the sense and pace of the narrative. Indeed one of my favourite sequences is Seymour quickly whipping up a chicken dish shown in miniature panels right at the bottom of a page, after having carrying his exhausted wife through to the kitchen, starting from a really large panel splash-scene of her lying near comatose on the lounge couch, in the midst of total toddler-related devastation on the opposing page.
The relative simplicity of the art means you frequently spot these devices as he's employing them whereas sometimes with more complex art styles your attention is entirely focused on the pen and ink work. And I mean this as a compliment because it's great to see someone so visibly expressing the story and bringing apparently mundane sequences to life and not just flatly presenting it panel by panel. Great stuff. I finished CRICKETS #3 wanting much more of Seymour's story. I have no idea whether Sammy plans to continue it in future issues at some point but I rather hope so. We still have in stock POOR SAILOR by the same creator too.
