The Cult of the Bully

The Simpsons: Homer chokes Bart (2023)

Way, way back in history, virtually at the dawn of time, I remember hearing a lot of buzz about a brand new TV show about a subversive young punk named Bart. His catch-phrases: "Eat my shorts!," "Ay, caramba!," and "Don't have a cow, man!" were already legendary.

But then I watched the programme.

It didn't take long to work out that Bart's was a mere bit part - along with the saxophone-playing Lisa and the long-suffering Marge. There could be only one hero: the fat, stupid, bigoted paterfamilias Homer.

I couldn't really understand it at first. Why was he the star? The other characters were so much more interesting. Why should he be the sun they all revolved around?

But then I started to grasp it. In the bizarre travesty of "family-friendly" (i.e. thought-hostile) norms which had gradually accreted in American pop culture - first in Hollywood, then Network TV - the change-resistant, ideologically as well as racially conservative white man must ipso facto be at the centre of everything.

The workings of this machine are adroitly analysed in Slavoj Žižek's notorious "Pervert's Guide to Cinema", where he points out the "secret motif" in (for instance) all the key Spielberg movies: "the recovery of the father, of his authority."

All in the Family: Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker (1971-83)

Archie Bunker was one of the most successful archetypes of this hero with a thousand faces. Again, at the time, I couldn't work out why the butt of almost all the jokes in the show was gradually humanised and centralised until he, inexorably, assumed the mantle of the whole production (remember Archie Bunker's Place?).

It put me in mind of Toril Moi's celebrated comment (from her 1985 book Sexual/textual Politics) about the oppressed subject "internalising the standards of the aggressor." [1] A character may start as a target for satire (like Archie Bunker's original, Alf Garnett, in the mordant British sit-com Till Death Us Do Part), but then the picture begins to adjust back to normal: and the unwise-at-times but basically loveable head-of-the-family model reasserts itself.

It also reminded me of the infamous 2005 "Monkey Pay-per-View" study, where a group of Macaques turned out to be willing to trade cups of fruit-juice for a chance to look at pictures of attractive, celebrity monkeys. Male macaques wanting to look at sexy females seems normal enough - but monkeys of all genders paying out juice to gaze on the images of powerful males is, I fear, yet another manifestation of this thesis.

Colin Watson: Snobbery with Violence (1971)

Let's not pretend that this is an exclusively American phenomenon. Colin Watson's entertaining analysis of the classic English Crime Story gives some startling data about the kinds of heroes who flourished in Britain between the wars. Take "Sapper"'s protagonist Bulldog Drummond, for instance. Here are a few salient quotes from his merry adventures:

[To an adversary he addresses as "fungus face']: "Only a keen sense of public duty restrains me from plugging you where you sit, you ineffable swine."

[His idea of a hobby]: "Years ago we had an amusing little show rounding up Communists and other unwashed people of that type. We called ourselves the Black Gang, and it was a great sport while it lasted."

[His views on Russia, "ruled by its clique of homicidal, alien jews"]: "The most frightful gang of murderous-looking cut-throats I've ever seen (officers seem to have no control)."

In the last case, it appears to be their disrespect for officers which weighs more in the balance for Drummond than any other aspect of the Bolshevik creed.

'Sapper': Bulldog Drummond at Bay (1935)

Prominent leftist poet Cecil Day-Lewis (himself an accomplished detective story writer) referred to Bulldog Drummond as "that unspeakable Public School bully." But, as Colin Watson explains:

... fantasy heroes usually are bullies. They must win, and since their opponents seem to enjoy a monopoly of cunning, sheer physical advantage has to be invoked.

It rather puts one in mind of Goering's much-quoted remark: "When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my revolver." [2]

Hermann Goering handing over his revolver to the allies (1945)

There was an interesting case reported in the media the other day about a British woman who was "shot dead by her father after a heated argument about Donald Trump." As so often on these occasions, it's the line taken by the defence that's really jaw-dropping. The father, a certain Kris Harrison, explained that:

he owned a Glock 9mm handgun for “home defence” and had received no formal firearms training. He initially denied drinking that day but later admitted consuming a 500ml carton of wine in the morning, though he insisted alcohol did not influence his actions [my emphasis].

He further claimed that "he had a conversation about guns with his daughter and she asked to see the gun" - despite never having "discussed his gun ownership with him before."

The sequence of events appears to have been more-or-less as follows: the father got into an argument with his daughter, Lucy Harrison, over the merits of Donald Trump's dismissal without penalty after his conviction for falsifying business records to hide the payment of hush-money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

Lucy's boyfriend, Sam Littler, told the court that:

Harrison asked her father: “How would you feel if I was the girl in that situation and I’d been sexually assaulted?”
He said Kris replied that it would not upset him much because he had two other daughters living with him. Harrison then ran upstairs, visibly distressed.
Around half an hour later, Kris took his daughter’s hand and led her into his bedroom. Seconds later, a gunshot rang out.
Littler said he rushed in and found Harrison lying on the floor, while her father screamed incoherently.
Police later concluded she died from a gunshot wound to the heart fired at medium range.

And the father's explanation?

"As I lifted the gun to show her I suddenly heard a loud bang. I did not understand what had happened. Lucy immediately fell."
He told police who attended the scene: "We got it out to have a look and just as I picked it up it just went off."

Needless to say, "a grand jury in the US ... determined there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone in connection with Lucy Harrison's death."

I mean, don't get me wrong, it may have been an accident. The contention that she "asked to see the gun" sounds a little unlikely, though, given her well-documented abhorrence of firearms. Also, it seems an odd thing to want to do a few minutes before leaving for the airport to fly home.

Back in Britain, at the Cheshire Coroners' Court, matters panned out a little differently:

Coroner Jacqueline Devonish announced that she found Lucy Harrison died due to unlawful killing on the grounds of gross negligence manslaughter.
The coroner said: "To shoot her through the chest whilst she was standing would have required him to have been pointing the gun at his daughter, without checking for bullets, and pulling the trigger.
"I find these actions to be reckless."

Unfortunately these findings are from a coroner's court and not a criminal court, so have no actual effect on Kris Harrison, "described by the coroner as a functioning alcoholic."

So just what does a guy have to do to get indicted for manslaugher - let alone murder - in a court in Texas? Maybe if it had been the other way round, and the daughter was the Trump suppporter? I suspect Kris Harrison might well be looking at a bit of jailtime then ...

Mark Twain: Roughing It (1872)

Given these contradictory responses from two courts in two different countries ("divided by a common language," as George Bernard Shaw once put it), the question remains: Is there something in American culture which particularly lends itself to idealisation of the violent bully?

George Orwell certainly thought so. As he said in his classic 1944 essay "Raffles and Miss Blandish":

In America, both in life and fiction, the tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is successful, is very much more marked [than in England]. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it possible for crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. Books have been written about Al Capone that are hardly different in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe and all the rest of the “log cabin to White House” brigade. And switching back eighty years, one finds Mark Twain adopting much the same attitude towards the disgusting bandit Slade, hero of twenty-eight murders, and towards the Western desperadoes generally. They were successful, they “made good,” therefore he admired them.

This may be a little unfair to Mark Twain. Orwell may have read as blind admiration a description originally meant ironically. At this distance in time, it's hard to be sure. Certainly Twain had no time for that bully extraordinaire, the much-hyped "hero" of San Juan Hill, President Theodore Roosevelt.

Richard Marschall: Bully!: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (2011)

Here are a few extracts from Matt Seybold's amusing article "The Nastiest Things Mark Twain Said About Teddy Roosevelt":

“[Roosevelt] is naively indifferent to the restraints of duty and even unaware of them; ready to kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in the way; and whenever he smells a vote, not only is he willing but eager to buy it, give extravagant rates for it and pay the bill not out of his own pocket or the party’s, but out of the nations, by cold pillage.” (February 16, 1905)

“The list of unpresidential things, things hitherto deemed impossible, wholly impossible, measurelessly impossible for a president of the United States to do — is much too long for invoicing here.” (May 29, 1907)

“Mr. Roosevelt is the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War – but the vast mass of the nation loves him, is frantically fond of him, even idolizes him. This is the simple truth. It sounds like a libel upon the intelligence of the human race, but it isn’t; there isn’t any way to libel the intelligence of the human race.” (September 13, 1907)

“Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off, and he would go to hell for a whole one.” (December 2, 1907)

“We have never had a President before who was destitute of self-respect and of respect for his high office; we have had no President before who was not a gentleman; we have had no President before who was intended for a butcher, a dive-keeper or a bully, and missed his mission.” (January 5, 1909)

“Roosevelt is the whole argument for and against, in his own person. He represents what the American gentleman ought not to be, and does it as clearly, intelligibly, and exhaustively as he represents what the American gentleman is. We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet to-day, and our President stands for us like a colossal monument visible from all the ends of the earth.” (April 3, 1906)

Ct Mirror: Trump and Teddy Roosevelt (2017)

Is it just me, or could one just as easily substitute another recent presidential surname for "Roosevelt" above?

Interestingly, Mark Twain's main theme here seems to be the President's vulgarity and lack of culture. The examples Twain analysed in more detail were mostly instances of "ungentlemanly" disrespect towards women - though he was also unsparing in his denunciations of the hypocrisy and perfidy shown by his countrymen in the brutal annexation of the Philippines.

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RNZ: NZ's Coalition Goverment (2023)
l-to-r: Winston Peters, Christopher Luxon, David Seymour

In conclusion, I guess I'd like to see this set of interesting - to me, at any rate - data-points as a bit more than just another anti-Trump diatribe. Most of those try to present him as something egregious, unprecedented in American - possibly in world - culture.

On the contrary, I'd like to argue that the real problem is that he's so completely typical. Every run-of-the-mill male chauvinist has contributed a little to this particular conundrum. Even in little old New Zealand we have more than our fair share of such consummate asses.

Mystic River: "Daddy is a king" (2003)

I think that one of the most striking instances of the cult in full cry would have to be the bizarre monologue delivered by Laura Linney at the end of Clint Eastwood's 2003 film Mystic River, where she extols her murderous criminal of a husband, played by Sean Penn, because he is, in her eyes, "a king." The fact that he's just ordered the killing of an old schoolmate, whom he and his gang suspected (wrongly) of having raped Sean Penn's daughter, simply serves to redouble her blind adoration.

We hear the same poisonous slop every day from the grovelling fools surrounding the great Don - even though each of them knows beyond question that they'll be replaced in an instant the moment they cease to genuflect ... and start to question.

Is it his fault they're such spineless jellyfish? No, it's theirs - and ours.

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Catherine McCarthy: The Comeback King: Donald Trump's Unfinished Business (2024)

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Notes:

1. While I did myself (I think) first encounter "internalising the standards of the aggressor" in Toril Moi's influential book, the actual source of the phrase is Hungarian Psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. In his 1932 paper "Confusion of the Tongues Between the Adults and the Child," Ferenczi argued that children facing extreme aggression or abuse "survive by internalizing ... the attacker, turning themselves into the object of use, and dissociating from their own feelings." This has a tendency to lead to "self-blame and compliance" to manage trauma.

2. My friend Richard Taylor has reminded me that the quote "When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my revolver," frequently attributed to Hermann Goering, "actually originates from the play Schlageter by Hanns Johst. The original line from the play is slightly different: "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" (When I hear culture, I release the safety catch of my Browning!). This line was performed in 1933 to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday and has been misattributed to several prominent Nazis, including Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler."

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Millennials (2): Dylan Horrocks' Hicksville (1998)

Dylan Horrocks: Hicksville (1998 / 2010)

Is Dylan Horrocks' Hicksville the Great New Zealand Novel?

That sounds like a facetious question, but it isn't meant as one.

This 'Great [...] Novel' idea stems, of course, from all the palaver about the 'Great American Novel.' Is there such a thing? Certainly there have been many attempts to write it, and many somewhat premature advertisements for its appearance: The Great Gatsby, Of Time and the River, Gravity's Rainbow - show me a great American writer, and I'll show you their entry for the elusive prize.

The problem, of course, is that the actual Great American Novel was written long before the idea gained currency. Or one of them had been, at any rate. Personally, I would argue that there are two. The term came (according to Wikipedia) from an 1868 essay by Civil War novelist John William De Forest.

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick (1851)

Candidate 1 has to be Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Among all the 19 claimants listed on Wikipedia, only this one has the necessary critical heft to have survived all the winds of fashion and the warring schools of interpretation to sail on majestically into the sunset.

It's an impenetrable, Mandarin text, written by an Easterner - a New Yorker, in fact - which is also a great adventure story spanning the world - not to mention all the depths and shallows of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It embodies paradox - is readable and unreadable at the same time - combines libraries of quotations with poignant accounts of the simplest human interactions.

Many people don't get the point of the first, most famous sentence of the story: "Call me Ishmael." This doesn't meant that the narrator's name actually is 'Ishmael', or even that he's adopted that as a useful nom-de-plume (like 'Mark Twain' for Samuel Clemens, for instance). It means that he is a wanderer upon the Earth, like Ishmael the eldest son of Abraham - in contrast to Isaac, Abraham's younger (but legitimate) son by his wife Sarah, the patriarch of the twelve tribes of Israel.

To a contemporary, 1850s, Bible-soaked reader this would have been so obvious that Melville doesn't even trouble to explain it. We are forced to refer to the narrator as 'Ishmael' for convenience's sake, but it's a description of character, not (strictly) a piece of nomenclature.

You see what I mean? Moby-Dick invites such speculations simply because of the oddball way in which it was written. Leslie Fiedler could cause a furore in the 1960s simply by suggesting that Queequeg and 'Ishmael' really are making love in the first chapter of the books - rather than simply lying together chastely like chums. And once you've thought that unthinkable thought, it opens up a whole serious of new perspectives on the novel (cf. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel).

Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn (1884)

The real problem arises from the almost equal and opposite claims of Mark Twain's masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, which has to be Candidate 2.

Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes - I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

So intoned William Dean Howells at the end of his long elegiac volume My Mark Twain (1910). Ernest Hemingway put it more simply (and quotably), in The Green Hills of Africa (1935):

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

The book grows and grows in its implications - with all its admitted faults - on repeated rereadings. It's hard to imagine any book so embodying the spirit of a country, or (at any rate) the spirit of both the old South and the advancing frontier.

If that isn't the Great American Novel, what is? 'There's been nothing as good since,' is the simple truth, for all the greatness of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway himself, Toni Morrison, and all the other great novelists who have flourished on those 'dark fields of the Republic,' that shopsoiled 'green breast of the New World' (to quote The Great Gatsby).

It comes down to one of those classic oppositions: Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? Schiller or Goethe? Wordsworth or Coleridge? One would like to answer all of them with the formula: "Both - and ..." - yet it must be admitted that a sneaking preference always creeps in.

There's always one of the two whom your hand brings down more enthusiastically from the bookshelf. Sometimes it's a simple classical / romantic face-off (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for instance) - but such is the complexity of each of their bodies of work, that it never resolves entirely to that.

Jane Austen / Charlotte Brontë would be another, I suppose - or Lady Murasaki / Sei Shōnagon. After a while they dissolve into triads, then groups, then just the whole spectrum of colours and shades of expression ...

Mark Twain and/or Herman Melville, then, is the best I can do for that elusive entity (or should I say chimera?), the author of the Great American Novel. It's a pretty magnificent choice to be confronted by, however!

Dylan Horrocks: Hicksville (1998)

Once before I've asked this question about the Great New Zealand novel. My answer then was a bit facetious, much though I admire the intricacies of Chris Kraus's I Love Dick (1997).

Hicksville, to me, seems to present far more solid claims. In his original article, William DeForest defined the Great American novel as "the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence." He went on to say:

"Is it time?" the benighted people in the earthen jars or commonplace life are asking. And with no intention of being disagreeable, but rather with sympathetic sorrow, we answer, "Wait." At least we fear that such ought to be our answer. This task of painting the American soul within the framework of a novel has seldom been attempted, and has never been accomplished further than very partially — in the production of a few outlines.

Art Spiegelman: Maus (1980-1991)

I'm sure that Dylan Horrocks had no such lofty intentions when he set out to create Hicksville. From what I gather, it came together from bits and pieces, written and drawn at various times, very much in the mode of his great contemporary Art Spiegelman's Maus, which first appeared, piecemeal, chapter by chapter, in Raw (1980-1991), the comics magazine he co-founded with his wife Françoise Mouly.

The first volume of Maus, 'My Father Bleeds History,' appeared in book-form in 1986, the year of the great graphic novel explosion. It was one of the three groundbreaking works which appeared during 1986-87 to confound dismissive critics (as chronicled in Douglas Wolk's 2007 book Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean).

Frank Miller: The Dark Knight Returns (1986)

They were (in no particular order), Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, and Alan Moore's Watchmen.

Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons: Watchmen (1986)

I suppose if you live in a cave you might have avoided encountering any of these classic works. The film of Watchmen (in its various versions) is more illustrator Dave Gibbons' gig than Alan Moore's - it left out one of the graphic novel's crucial subplots - although an animated version of this, a pirate story, was released separately. It's a critique of superhero comics (as Don Quixote is a critique of novels of chivalry), but that's only one of the many things it does.

The Dark Knight Returns is only loosely connected - more on a thematic than a plot level - with Christopher Nolan's 'Batman' film trilogy, though it's hard to imagine the latter existing without the former. It's the most conventional of the three, though Frank Miller's subsequent projects 300 and Sin City show that he, too, is a creative force to be reckoned with.

Dylan Horrocks, ed.: Pickle (1993-1997)

The second volume of Spiegelman's Maus, 'And Here My Troubles Began,' appeared in 1991. Dylan Horrock's Hicksville began to be serialised in the second volume of his magazine Pickle, devoted to 'the finest in New Zealand comics', in 1993.

When I met Dylan Horrocks at the 2018 Manawatu Writers' Festival, he told me that in many ways he still considered that the best way to read the novel: in its original serialised form, surrounded by other comics, and all the other contextualising bits and pieces by him and other artists which had to be edited out in book form.

I tried to explain to him something of what Hicksville had meant to me when I first read it in the late 1990s (I was late to Pickle, unfortunately, though I certainly followed his Milo's Week strip comic which ran in the NZ Listener between 1995 and 1997).

Hicksville was an achievement of another order, however. And - much though I enjoyed its follow-up, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen (2014), it couldn't really be said to have quite the same heft. But then, the same could easily be said of Twain and Melville's follow-up books: respectively, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852)).

Dylan Horrocks: Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen (2014)

So what did speak to me so powerfully in Hicksville? First of all, it was a piece of identity literature: intimately bound up with the problem of what it is to be a Pākehā New Zealander - stuck in what seems to be the wrong hemisphere, with the wrong cultural conditioning, and yet with an increasingly powerful sense of place and identity.

The strip comic with Captain Cook, Charles Heaphy and Hone Heke included at various points in the narrative gives a perfect metaphor for this sense of cultural drift - not quite knowing where you are, but engaged - consciously or unconsciously - in learning how not to worry too much about the fact.

There are nice vignettes of exile, too: strip comics drawn on the kitchen table in a London flat, side-trips to Eastern European countries to pick up on their own complex comics traditions - not to mention Sam's phantasmagorical journey to Hollywood to see the world of his alter-ego / nemesis Dick Burger close-up ...

Above all, Hicksville is a comic obsessed with comics. Everyone in the imaginary town of Hicksville, set on the tip of East Cape, reads comics all the time, and is intimately knowledgeable of their strange, compromised history: caught between the devil of commercialism and the deep sea of unfettered artistic experimentation.

And then there's that Name of the Rose-like secret library of manuscript and limited edition comics, including the greatest works of the greatest creators, the ones that they longed to write, but somehow never managed to, stored in the old lighthouse on the point, watched over by the enigmatic Kupe.

Dylan Horrocks: Hicksville (1998 / 2010)

Into this situation comes Leonard Batts, an American comics journalist, author of a biography of Jack Kirby, who is investigating the latest comics sensation, Dick Burger, by paying a visit to his mysterious Antipodean hometown. (I don't know if the resemblance between his name and that of Leonard Bast, the hapless victim of class snobbery in E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910), is intentional or not, but given the general level of erudition in Dylan Horrocks' work, it wouldn't surprise me at all ...)

Dylan Horrocks: Hicksville (1998)

There's a lovely sense of recognition when the comic reenacts a classic scene from John O'Shea's pioneering NZ film Runaway (1964) to herald Batts's arrival in town. Things only come into existence the moment they're written about - or filmed, or drawn - in this novel, and such imaginative acts appear to be stored forever in some kind of Akashic tablets of the soul. That, at any rate, is how I read the book's overall message.

Is it strictly a work of speculative fiction, could one say? That's harder for me to answer. Certainly the fact that it's set in an impossible place - a town in a parallel universe (not unlike the one in Moore's Watchmen, where Nixon gets perpetually re-elected, and pirate comics have the place superheroes hold in our reality) - would appear to substantiate the claim.

It's less realist at its roots than either Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn: that much is certain. Less, too, than any of its possible rivals for 'Great New Zealand Novel': the bone people? The Lovelock Version? The Matriarch (either in the original or in its rewritten version)?

However you classify its genre, for me Hicksville holds all the aces: it's funny, sad, wise, intricate, and incorrigibly from here. It took a long time for the Americans to notice what they had in Melville - not to mention the fact that Mark Twain was something far more than a clown. I hope it doesn't take us quite so long to see the merits of Dylan Horrocks' masterpiece.

Dylan Horrocks: sketches (2012)

The latest, 2010, edition of the comic includes a wonderfully elegiac introduction. In it Horrocks charts his earliest comics influences - Charles Schulz's Peanuts, Carl Barks' Donald Duck, but above all Hergé's Tintin.

Talk about the landscape (or dreamscape) of my life! I, too, grew up on those comics: Tintin and Asterix, Peanuts and Eagle (my father's particular favourite) - though for us the unquestionable pinnacle was occupied by the seemingly endless permutations of Carl Barks' imagination - even though we didn't even (then) know him by name.

Perhaps, then, I should admit that I am prejudiced. Comics may not be the all-consuming passion for me that they are for Dylan - just one amongst a number of loves - but I understand (and can share) the magic of childhood associations he evokes so well in the Hicksville corpus as a whole.

Dylan Horrocks & Richard Case: Timothy Hunter: The Names of Magic (2002)

Funnily enough, the introduction also touches on his Dick Burger-like decision to get involved in the mainstream comics industry: his work on Timothy Hunter and Batgirl and other titles from Dc's edgier arm Vertigo. As he himself puts it:

The money was great and I worked with some nice people ... but the stories didn't come easily. For the first time in my life I was making comics I couldn't respect. As time went on it grew harder and harder to write or draw my own comics. Soon just looking at a comic - any comic - filled me with dread ... I could no longer see the point of it all ... I should have listened to Sam. [viii]

Dylan Horrocks: Incomplete Works (2014)

Twain and Melville, too, suffered through their long nights of the soul. Both of them ran into a creative doldrums after the supreme effort of their great novels. It was good to see Dylan Horrocks back on the bookshops again in 2014 with the double-whammy of Incomplete Works and Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen. It seems he has learned to listen to Sam again, after all.

Dylan Horrocks: Hicksville (1998 / 2010)

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Dylan Horrocks (2019)

Dylan Horrocks
(b. 1966)

Select Bibliography:

1. Hicksville: A Comic Book. 1998. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2001.


2. Hicksville: A Comic Book. 1998. New Edition. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010.


3. The Names of Magic. Illustrated by Richard Case. 2001. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2002.


4. New Zealand Comics and Graphic Novels. Wellington: Hicksville Press, 2010.
   [available for download as a pdf here].


5. Incomplete Works. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2014.


6. Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2014.

Homepages & Online Information:

Author's Homepage

Wikipedia entry

Dylan Horrocks

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