Rejoice, you million! Rejoice! Dylan Horrocks has launched a new webcomics blog, Hicksville Comics!! Where he'll be serializing stories old and new!!! (Honestly, there aren't enough exclamation marks on my keyboard for this news.)

Horrocks hinted about this on his blog awhile back, so it doesn't come as a complete shock, but still. New Dylan Horrocks comics?!


Here's the announcement from the Hicksville site:

Well, it’s taken me a while, but I’m finally joining the wonderful world of online comics. Henceforth, this site will be my primary way of serialising long stories, replacing the old paper pamphlet format of PickleAtlas. I’m making the shift for a number of reasons - from my growing enthusiasm for the internet to the appeal of weekly deadlines - but for those who still love paper, never fear: everything will end up as book collections as well. and

So - I’m starting with two ongoing serials:

The American Dream: this is a totally new story that I’ve been working on for some years (I think I began writing notes for it in 2003 or 2004). Not sure exactly how long it will be, but probably less than 100 pages, and I plan on putting up a few new pages per week.

Sam Zabel & the Magic Pen: I already published the first chapter of this story in Atlas #2 & 3 (from the wonderful Drawn & Quarterly), so the first 26 pages will look pretty familiar to anyone who read them there. But I’ve now added colour (which I’d always hoped to do eventually), and of course from chapter two onwards, it’ll be all new.

Future serials will include Atlas (I’m in the process of reworking the opening section, complete with some new material), and various other things; I plan to have two serials running at any given time.

I’ll also be gradually adding short stories, some of which were drawn for recent anthologies, along with old stuff that’s hard to find. First up are Siso and The Physics Engine, both of which were drawn for anthologies of New Zealand writing.

As I’m kinda new to this webcomics thing, please forgive any early hiccups - and be aware that I’m still ironing out a few kinks in the coding, etc.

If you don't know who Dylan Horrocks is, shame on you. You might be excused because his work hasn't ever gotten the attention it deserves in the States, I think, but still, shame on you.

Ten years ago my first "professional" writing was doing comics reviews for a website run by Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games fame). One of the first reviews I did was of Horrocks's Hicksville, which had serialized in the pages of Pickle and was by then available in a completed and collected edition from Black Eye. It was later reissued by Drawn & Quarterly, and while it's out of print, second hand copies can be had for reasonable rates.

Here's the review. Unless you hate goodness or something, you owe it to yourself to hunt down a copy of Hicksville, and to keep track of the new offerings on Hicksville Comics, as well!

HICKSVILLE, a review by Chris Roberson
"Hicksville" is.
--a very small town.
--a comic lover's utopia.
--the very best comic you've never read.

Everyone who truly loves comics comes to a certain realization sooner or later: The rest of the world just doesn't seem to "get it". Oh, there are the small victories, now and again. You might convince a friend to read Sandman, or Astro City, or Watchmen, and watch as their eyes light up at the moment they realize that comics can be great. Or you might bring your significant other into the fold, and watch with delight as they read their way through your collection, and eventually go off and find books of their own (it's usually best if they end up liking books you don't; that way, you know the conversion is complete). But these small victories are few and far between. The rest of the time, we have to resign ourselves to the certain knowledge that the rest of the world does not, or cannot appreciate comics.

But suppose that weren't the case. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that somewhere in the world there was a place where everyone felt about comics just as you do. That you could walk into the grocery store, or laundry mat, or local bar, and strike up a conversation with anyone who came in about the latest issue of Mage, or whether the Thing could once and for all beat the Hulk. Just imagine.

Now, keeping that thought in mind, go find yourself a copy of Dylan Horrocks's Hicksville. Originally serialized in his comic Pickle, the storyline presented in Hicksville has been streamlined and updated for the collected edition. It's about this guy, who comes from America to New Zealand working on a book about comics. Or it's about this woman, who after a love affair collapses travels the world, meeting along the way a mystical cartoonist in Eastern Europe who explains what life is really all about. Or it's about a writer and artist returning to his home town after a few years' attempt at breaking into the comics big time in America and England. Or it's about.

The truth of the matter is that Hicksville is about all of those things, and more. It contains love stories, and travel in exotic lands, and mysteries and deceit, and finally a secret history of comics themselves. But at the core, at the heart of the matter, the book is about the town itself: Hicksville. Hicksville is a small New Zealand town which, though entirely fictional, takes on a life of it's own. And I promise you, if you love comics, you'll wish that Hicksville was real.

In the small hamlet of Hicksville, everyone loves comics. I mean, they LOVE comics. Oh, the postman doesn't go in much for superheroes, and instead prefers mini-comics, and then there's the woman who just can't go for Kirby, and the two old men who can't seem to agree on the relative merits of Sergio Argones' Groo. But doctrinal differences aside, the simple truth is that they all practice the same religion, the worship of comics, and they all in the end speak the same language.

That covers the substance of Hicksville, but what of the style? Dylan Horrocks, himself a native New Zealander, has appeared in various and sundry anthologies over the past few years, but most readers very likely have never seen his work before. His style, which might best be categorized as "idiosyncratic", tends towards cartoonish, iconic images, but changes in subtle ways from one section to the next, depending upon the mood of the scene and the level of interaction the reader is expected to have with the characters. His style, however, can be deceptively simple; one look at his intricately mannered landscapes in any of several wordless passages makes clear that Horrocks knows exactly what he is doing, and employs a cartoonish style with the skill of a surgeon and his scalpel.

A few years ago, after the publication of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comic, there was some debate concerning how McCloud's book might affect later works. That is, with a new definition of the basic concepts and underlying architecture of comics, would comics creators then go on to use those basic concepts in new and novel ways? I can't say whether Dylan Horrocks read Understanding Comics or not, though I find it hard to believe that he hadn't. In either case, whether he did or did not, upon reading Hicksville for the first time, I was struck by how effortlessly Horrocks seemed to be doing things that so few, if any before him had even attempted.

Hicksville may very well be the first in a new trend, an entirely new way of approaching words and pictures together. If that is the case, then I for one am very much looking forward to what comes next. In the meantime, I'll be busy rereading Hicksville, wishing that little town were real.