Page 45 Review by Jonathan
"Men without politics. Who know that it hardly matters what they believe. As long as they're on top, and laughing... fuck us all.
"They're laughing under a darkening sky. While we wait.
"For the shitrain that is coming to drown us."
I did briefly consider attempting a Gonzo-style review of GONZO, but as long-time Thompson collaborator Alan Rinzler comments in the foreword, literally reams of awful, intoxicated, first-draft prose are submitted to him almost daily. Quite simply Hunter Thompson was Gonzo, and for anyone else to even attempt to recreate it, merely results in parody. In fact, arguably once the drugs and the booze had rendered Thompson artistically near-impotent his writing became a sad parody of itself, before he entered a painfully long fallow period where he produced very little of real merit at all. Something which Thompson fully recognized and probably rather significantly contributed to his decision to blow his own brains out. Whilst GONZO is barely more than a brilliant primer on the man and his work, it's enough to make you realise, if you didn't already know it, that there was probably only one way Hunter S. Thompson was going to check out of this world. By his own hand, and in an impulsive manner.
What GONZO does is raise the whole debate once more about how much Thompson's best work was really just his creative genius given full rein, and how much of it the result of the frenetic state of mind that he fuelled with a never ending intake of booze and pills. It's genuinely difficult to say, the answer is certainly both to some extent. What is certainly true is that he is one of the very, very few reporters who managed to break the maxim that you yourself must never become the story.
The story here never lingers overlong on any chapter or event in Thompson's life and the dynamic art similarly conveys the restless nature of a man who was always on the move. Indeed the '80s, '90s & '00s are dealt with by three near-identical panels which very brutually capture the creative impasse he found himself in before deciding once and for all that enough was enough. When he was on the road he clearly longed for home, his farm in Aspen, and when at the farm he clearly felt the itch to get back on the road.
GONZO doesn't really seek to explore what made Hunter S. Thompson tick like a bomb set to explode with bare seconds left on the timer. It doesn't even really begin to hint at it, we just get given the impression that in the main he always was that way, which clearly can't be the case. In that sense GONZO really is just a primer. Those that come away from this fascinated by this extraordinary character will undoubtedly want to learn more about him.
