BELOW AMBITION - SIMON HANSELMANN

Saw this the very last day I spent in Chapel Hill. I went to the library, saw it on the shelf and sat down right there to read the whole thing. I do love Megg, Mogg and Owl, and the greater Hansel-verse, one of the drawbacks of living overseas is limited access to that sort of stuff. So I have to try to cram it in when I’m back in the states. Anyway, I’ll approach this one with a big “spoilers” warning. M,M&O is really serial or sequential, sometimes characters die and come back, it’s not clear what order events are happening in, etc. However, characters have changed and deepened in specific and lasting ways, we are sometimes given flashbacks that explain some of the character dynamics and, generally, there’s now a good amount of lore about all the major characters. This book is short, Hanselmann claims in a short essay on the back cover that this whole thing was a warm up to a much larger piece, and punchy. It contains a lot of the more extreme “gross” stuff that this comic often gets into. It centers around Werewolf Jones and Megg touring with their noise band, Horse Mania. They constantly get dangerously fucked up, they taunt the audience and staff at shoes. They have all sorts of crazy sex and don’t move the “main” story along very far. That being said, there is a flash-forward at the very end of the book, which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before, which really, to my mind, changes the way one reads the comics. It’s revealed that Megg, at some point in the future, has a daughter and seems to live a somewhat comfortable and normal life. Basically, she gets it together to some degree and gets out of the depressing miasma that the comic typically chronicles. The fact that Megg could always die (earlier in the comic, she “jokes” about killing herself) or just be a fuck-up forever, is one of the major sources of tension in the comic and it feels weird to know that it works out, at least for Megg. Something to ponder. Anyway, the rest of the comic is quite funny. Hanselmann really nails the milieu and vibe around a DIY noise show. The Werewolf Jones and Megg banter on-stage is really funny and Hanselmann has gotten really good at ratcheting up the grossness and absurdity then cutting to a panel of someone’s mad and/or horrified face. He pulls this trick a few times and it was always funny. No Mogg or Owl or much of the other characters, which makes it feel more minor, but I really enjoyed my afternoon reading it. Cannot wait for the bigger story.