Book Review - Hey, Mister: The Fall Collection

By Pete Sickman-Garner, Top Shelf Productions $12.95, 176 pages

An unholy trinity makes up the center of Pete Sickman-Garner's caustic comic book Hey, Mister. Aunt Mary is a surly barfly with a foul vocabulary; "Mister" is a lazy malcontent who carries a torch for Aunt Mary; and diminutive naif Young Tim has the physical disproportions of a "Peanuts" character, caught in the real world. Through their eyes, Sickman-Garner offers a jaundiced vision of shiftless slackers and consumer culture.

Hey, Mister combines the raunchy comedy of Peter Bagge's Neat Stuff with the raunchy surrealism of Chester Brown's Yummy Fur, with the latest paperback collection turning its sights on religion and folklore. The anthology's subtitle, "The Fall Collection," even has a biblical pun, with the cover showing Mister and Aunt Mary being banished from the Garden of Eden.

"The Trouble With Jesus" imagines Christianity Inc. as a huge corporation manned by saints and apostles, with Young Tim promoted from mail-room boy to the right-hand man of Christ Himself, whom Sickman-Garner finds to be an affable CEO with a Polo shirt and a ponytail. The story's finale, which depicts the Second Coming as a massive rock concert, is a little too similar to a comparable "South Park" episode, but its amusing premise discovers that the Messiah isn't above office politics.

Other stories offer skewed riffs on "The Wizard of Oz" and "Jack and the Beanstalk," while in "Dial M for Mister" the title character gets involved with the deities of Mt. Olympus, who behave like movie stars and supermodels. Shorter vignettes find Sickman-Garner chatting with his wife, and in "I Am Not Worthy," he frets about the afterlife: "What if God's a huge neat-freak? Or a gun-nut?"

Despite Hey, Mister's bizarre, at times supremely scatological subject matter, Sickman-Garner has a simple, deadpan drawing style that looks with equal disdain upon the mundane (morons who talk on cell phones while driving) and the monstrous (drunken, diaper-clad giants). Hey, Mister: The Fall Collection rarely goes for belly-laughs, but its idiosyncratic black comedy gets under your skin.

-- Curt Holman??