CRISIS ZONE - SIMON HANSELMANN

AVAILABLE

Like many of you, I mostly read this thing as a webcomic last year. I actually stopped partway through so I could enjoy the full thing as a book. Hanselmann’s comics are really well suited for Instagram. His panels are already very consistent and square and he’s really good at telling short, funny/depressing stories that accrue weight over time as you know more about the main characters. It’s also nice to see he’s blowing up. I went to the book signing for this, at Fantographics no less, and the line was around the block. Hanselmann is Tasmanian but lives here in beautiful Seattle, so I’ve seen him at zine events and whatnot before, but never with the sort of line he had for this. But on to the book itself; I can only hope that this goes down as the definitive “lockdown artwork” when we look back at 2020 from a future vantage point. I’m guessing this book will deepen and get more interesting as we move on from 2020 and forget how strange the beginning of the lockdown was. This will be especially true for those of us in Seattle since Hanselmann includes a lot of Seattle specific stuff, most famously the CHAZ and related BLM protests. It’s also nice that Hanselmann doesn’t betray the characters by making them major protest figures or involving them deeply in local politics or making them “woke”. These people (Megg, Mogg, WWJ, Owl, Jennifer, Booger, etc.) clearly are too self-involved and insular to care about politics so it’s nice to see that Hanselmann stayed true to that. There’s more minor PNW references too, like a riff on the what-does-all-this-tear gas-do-to-menstrual-cycles question that we’ve been dealing with up here. However, the tone departs from MM&O comics in other ways. This book is really heavy on Werewolf Jones. He’s always drifted between main character and periphery, I think it’s fair to call him the fan-favorite, and he’s always been more cartoony and “fun” compared to the others. Even his dark stuff, like how shitty of a dad he is, is typically played primarily for laughs. This book lampoons the TIGER KING phenomena (which is going to look so strange in 5 years) by giving WWJ a TV show called ANUS KING which is exactly what you think it is. His fame allows the story to get super crazy and much further out than we’ve seen before. WWJ forms his own autonomous zone, he goes to prison, Owl breaks bad and forces Jones into sexwork, several characters transition, characters have sex with Carrot Top, someone is abducted by aliens, people are shot, people die, it’s much more plot focused rather than focused in people’s interiority (especially depression) like in pervious volumes. I assume we’ll get back to the more regular stuff with “MEGG’S COVEN” which Hanselmann has said is next (I actually think it was supposed to already be published but he switched to work on this when the pandemic hit). I really liked this and thought it was funny. I’m into the gross-out and druggy humor and I’m into the stoner-loser milieu Hanselmann conjures. I miss the deeper stuff w/r/t depression and codependency and family dysfunction and failure but I’m sure it will be back with a more carefully plotted sequel. But as something that was written daily, during a historic crisis, and put out for free online, it is without peer. I’ll show this to my teen kid when, in the future, they ask what it was like during the first lockdown (I’m guessing we’ll be on number 60 or so by then) was like. 2020 cat/Carrot Head/witch 3-somes.