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.