Hans Rickheit

There are limits to how much I enjoyed this book, though I certainly appreciated it. If David Cronenberg were to visualize the dreams of a modern-day Marquis de Sade addicted to steampunk, it might look something like this. Not that Folly is pornographic. It’s merely profane.

Collecting Rickheit’s short works (in particular, the two series Chrome Fetus and Cochlea & Eustachia), Folly makes sport with readerly outrage and disgust. Emerging from some strange, gleefully irrational unconscious, the comics deviate from narrative norms, telling stories that continually derail and reorient themselves, shocking and bewildering us along the way. In bizarre mises en scène, Rickheit parodies (or camps?) gender, politics and sexuality, hyping the vagina as a vending machine that soberly advertizes the utility of its lubrication; or celebrating the deviance of a politician who demands fellatio, then murders his citizens.

The world Folly portrays is Rickheit’s Undermind and it is a place of thresholds and orifices, of tyrants and interlopers – one that conflates machinery and seething puddles of organic matter. The whole place oozes, like the unconscious, with taboo thoughts. Like some hyper-Freudian perversion of Gaston Bachelard’s study, The Poetics of Space, it slides open drawers that secrete incomprehensible blobs of flesh recognizable only by their genitalia. In our secret compartments, meat is meat, it seems to say. But the Undermind is also a matroyshka: each threshold once breached reveals another inner world, containing yet more cavities, drawers, or tunnels into worlds even more deeply embedded. These are Bachelard’s attics, nests and shells gone rogue and grotesque with all that we censure.

What does it all mean? The twins who infiltrate, steal, take flight in rabbit-shaped balloons, and are subjected to machinic violation – all the while dressed in ridiculous, ass-flaunting dresses that mimic children’s clothing. The parade of mannequins, prosthetics and gas masks. The unformed organisms pulsing with damage like something out of The Fly. This is as unsettling a collection as I’ve ever read because it admits all the unreason and defilement that we would seek to exclude.… (more)