HyperThick

HyperThick

Steve Aylett

Floating World paperback $15.95

***** (5 stars) review by Christopher Geary 

“If you drink a glass of water while falling off a cliff it has the same effect as poison.” Another bundle of joys, brain-child of Steve Aylett, master-mind of indie comics, HYPERTHICK delivers madly inventive surrealism & frequently caustic satirical broadsides at peak levels of creativity for a stylised medium. Eccentricity of retro-flavoured comics art does style-critics no ersatz favours at all, while “horror expands to accommodate one’s endurance” with earnest defiance of 4-colours conventionality & rationalities taken away to extremes. “Sure, coincidence conducts electricity. But it’s not meant to.”  

Far from rectangular standards of sequential & fictional outlooks now, daze-trader Aylett plops dry wits into witnessing human worlds at bogus works & kilns of role-play. Creative cooking with gassy discharges, here’s gunpowder writing that modestly blasts even serviceable hyperbole with subconscious glee. Fresh icons: fractal-haunted rebel Su Pesto, haywire detective Biloxi Blake, pirate Fox Grave, wry blurter Benny the Hen compete for any attention-span using their tauntingly inspirational jazz, with keynote speech-balloons. “A ghost is the afterimage of someone not seen during their lifetime.” Aylett’s patented sarcastic mayhem looks increasingly likely, but you cannot guess the rest. Meanwhile this book's resident philosophical advertiser Harry McInch might denounce capitalism jokes while only his elusive figment 'Donna' knows why. 

“..hope we’re an elemental puzzle, but it’s all orphan symmetry I’m afraid.” All this, plus ‘Sedition Kitsch’, too. There’s clearly something apocalyptic for this multi-verse of twisty endings that emerge from dreamscape musings & medley (“zigzagging to please is exhausting”) of rambling themes, before...

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