hillbilly epicurean.

I remember very clearly the first time I saw that most disturbing of comics, Maakies.  My parents had taken my little brother and I out of town - I was in high school, a freshman I think, and Trev was till blowing his silver trumpet in the middle school band room.  I don't remember which town it was - Roanoke, Virginia maybe, or Charlotte, North Carolina, or any of a million other medium-sized Southern cities with a huge white and beige faceless mall.  We were eating in a chain restaurant, a nice one as I remember, and it was raining outside. I had distractedly picked up one of those entertainment weeklies (as I still do) hoping for comics, a decent news story from an unexpected angle, or at least a crossword.  And then I saw it - a four panel comic that had all the beauty of the great comic strips from the earliest years of that art - Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, and of course the early pie-eyed, newspaper version of Mickey Mouse a la "Plane Krazy" and "The Sky Pirates."

There was, however, a most substantial difference.  Maakies is totally, utterly, completely insane.  It is vulgar, violent, and post-modern - it makes jokes out of life's greatest horrors.  It takes the Platonic, immortal, classic cartoon character and, to be frank, makes it Nihilist.  And it is brilliant.

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