Happy Town
Happy Town by Justin Madson. 11 issues (1-3 are collected in “Collection v.1″ and 4-5 in “Collection v.2″). Just Mad Books, 2001-2005.
Mini-comics blogger Shawn Hoke made a list of his top 5 desert island mini-comics (towards the bottom of the page). In the company of Kevin Huizenga and John Porcellino (two I already love) are Julie Doucet, Jennifer Daydreamer, and Justin Madson’s Happy Town. I’ve read a book by each of the first two, but I’d never heard of Madson. I headed over to his website and ordered the boxed set of Happy Town 1-10 and the more recent issue 11. It’s a continuing story that Justin’s been working on for 4 years now.
The story begins with a two guys walking and talking. Suddenly one of them becomes unmoored from the ground and floats off into the sky. It shifts over to two guys talking in a coffee shop. One has just taken up photography and the other is going to ask his girlfriend to marry him. The story goes through a few different scenes that, other than a rash of people floating away, are fairly realist. It doesn’t stay that way for long. As the story continues science fiction and fantasy tropes start to pile up: a rocket planned to go to Saturn for colonization, a mystical hippy teacher guy, a detective with a robotic arm, demons, angels(?), a women who wears a jet pack and fights crime, a former group of adventurers now retired, and robots robots robots.
Some of these elements are the height of cliche and nothing is done that improves them: the reunited former members of a government magic demon fighting group whose former companion has turned evil and is trying to destroy the world and they “knew this would happen” and they “should’ve done something about it”; the mystical teacher hippie guy who wanders off with a women who he is instructing on using her great power and how she is going to be important, etc, etc.
On the other hand some of the elements that could be rather cliched and banal are handled in an interesting way: people dealing with discovering that their spouse was a robot; a women dealing with her new girlfriend’s secret identity as a crime fighter. When Madson focuses on the emotional drama and human interaction evoked from these fantastical situations he is much more interesting and successful. Less so with the unexplained magic powers and mystical goings on.
Sometimes it feels like there are too many things going on in the story. One assumes the robots and the demons and such are all going to relate somehow, but one also wonders if its too complicated and too lacking in any sense of closure. Madson follows a huge cast of characters through the series (this is worse than the second season of Twin Peaks in that regard), and I found it hard to keep track of them all or even identify them at times.
The drawing of the characters is rather interesting. They have long flat jutting out chins (a bit reminiscent of Matt Groening), dots of varying sizes for eyes, and generally stooped over posture. Very little shading is evident, just black areas. Backgrounds are simple line drawings. Madson has a tendency to put in weird swirly shapes, both as shadows and representative symbols of magic or wind, that I am not taken with.
The covers of the books have images done in wonderfully subdued colors that makes me wish the whole series were colored. I think some color would really help differentiate the characters (but obviously would be a lot more work). Layouts are rather standard, averaging 3 - 5 rectangular panels a page which make for easy reading if not interesting design.
Happy Town is an interesting series (and rather unique in its bricolaged sci-fi/fantasy way), and the longer I read it the more I enjoyed it. From the things I’ve read it seems Madson does not have a real clear plan for the series, which may be the cause of some of its weaknesses, particularly early on. I’ll probably check out his “The Waiting Sun” book (a self-contained Happy Town story) to see what he does with a beginning, middle, and end.
Tags: minicomics
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