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Friday 18 August 2017

Highbone Theater by Joe Daly Review


Books like Highbone Theater make me wonder what motivates artists like Joe Daly. Is he just doing such staggering amounts of hallucinogens/weed that he really believes what he’s doing is a masterpiece of sorts and therefore worth the effort? Because this is a 560+ page comic - an amazing achievement in itself - that’s about the mundane adventures of a twentysomething stoner who doesn’t really do anything! 

Palmer is a socially awkward stoner with a dickish meathead flatmate. Palmer hooks up with a girl. He takes a lot of acid, weed, etc. and goes on weird trips. He has strange dreams. And the book sort of just peters out. You’d think with a project this size that Daly would have a point! Or did he just start it and hope some meaning would emerge somewhere down the line? 

I love Daly’s art style, which is very detailed with a strong line. The characters are uniquely proportioned in an exaggerated fashion - the men are very muscular, the women are very curvy - for seemingly no reason besides aesthetics, but it works. The spare use of colour is excellent so that when you get a colour sequence, the colours really pop. 

Some of the scenes are fleetingly compelling. Billy Boy, whom I’d thought was a one-joke, throwaway character (he has a pipe in his butthole for farts to escape), has an interesting arc and Palmer’s search for him in the latter half of the book was exciting - before it fizzles out into nothing, like everything else here. 

Maybe Highbone Theater is too avant-garde for me and I’m just missing the point but it felt like an overindulgent, meandering and sprawling mess that really needed focus and direction. Instead, I recommend checking out Joe Daly’s better comic, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book, which is far more coherent and entertaining.

1 comment:

  1. Smoking tons of weed while cartooning isn't gonna give you "focus and direction."

    ReplyDelete