A review by thecommonswings
Billy Hazelnuts by Tony Millionaire
5.0
As countless attempts to do surrealist comics very quickly come apart because of their creators’ inability to understand what surrealism actually is, those people should look to Tony Millionaire to find out how it’s done. Although very different to Jim Woodring in content and style, he shares a very similar sense of representing dreams on paper. Whereas Woodring heads into a richly symbolic world, Millionaire seems more interested in childhood and the universe surrounding those formative years. Billy Hazelnuts - created by mice, “humanised” by a young girl - flirts with nursery rhymes and fairy tale territory, but drives it in this ferocious direction where events have a kind of inevitability to them.
There’s a line in Twin Peaks, another work of art that demonstrates the success and failure of trying for surrealism, that I always love from Mike, the one armed man: “I mean it like it is, like it sounds...” I always read that line as a crystallisation of Lynch’s belief that the story doesn’t have to make literal sense but have a sort of flow that it DEMANDS to have. So the events in this make no narrative sense in conventional story telling but have this real sense of feeling like moments rising from the depths of the unconscious mind. There’s a sadness and anger and beauty here, but one that feels drawn from a singular vision and brought into a glorious whole. It’s a phenomenal work of art, let alone a great comic
There’s a line in Twin Peaks, another work of art that demonstrates the success and failure of trying for surrealism, that I always love from Mike, the one armed man: “I mean it like it is, like it sounds...” I always read that line as a crystallisation of Lynch’s belief that the story doesn’t have to make literal sense but have a sort of flow that it DEMANDS to have. So the events in this make no narrative sense in conventional story telling but have this real sense of feeling like moments rising from the depths of the unconscious mind. There’s a sadness and anger and beauty here, but one that feels drawn from a singular vision and brought into a glorious whole. It’s a phenomenal work of art, let alone a great comic