Hypermutt

One of the weirdest and funniest premises in Max Huffman’s earlier book Cover Not Final is that live music is illegal within its world. Used as a springboard for a set of gags, the reader gets their giggles, while the mind still reels at how unenforceable such a rule would be.

Like the preceding volume of crime funnies, Huffman’s minicomic series Hypermutt is set in Business Park, situating Huffman’s surrealism inside a landscape of corporate blandness. Issue one begins with a town hall meeting in a Taco Bell, where a guy complains about zoning laws. This leads to him beginning a relationship with a woman who works in pharmaceutical marketing. A marriage commences, between the annoying and the morally repugnant, and from their union springs the idea of the Hypermutt: a horde of dogs enfolding each new dog encountered  into its idea of dogness as a many-headed mass, an exponential cerberus for a world made into hell.

It is easy to see this as satire, and especially early on, Huffman foregrounds the gags. But the comic grows increasingly abstract and weird, the backdrop of the world becomes understandable as science fiction. The cartooned abstraction of its methods allows the physically impossible to be depicted making it clear these characters are playing God. We are not in our reality, where people working in big pharma are beyond the reach of the catastrophes they wreak: Huffman allows us the satisfaction of seeing terrible people punished for their hubris, rooting his work in a simple comedic payoff.

Still, what becomes clear when reading Hypermutt is that Huffman is taking his silliest premises seriously. For music to be illegal is for the world to have handicapped itself against the spiritual. Albert Ayler asserted “music is the healing force of the universe,” and the world of Business Park, of Hypermutt, is a world with a tendency towards sickness and brokenness that can’t be corrected for. For all that comics, and comedy more generally, has rhythms, here in Hypermutt they are strange and disjointed and shudder away from harmony. The reader attempting to nod along will find themselves lost as Huffman speeds ahead, leaving them to fill in plot beats from a few stray threads of set-up. This will likely be a difficult comic for the casual reader. The cubist forms of Huffman’s figures have conquered the page, giving way to a defiance of what’s expected from a panel progression, or from a serialized comic.

Hypermutt is a series of nine minicomics, most of which are 12 pages, including covers, costing four dollars, though issue 8 was double-sized and sold for $6. I don’t like the price point any more than you do, but the format is appealing, and Huffman uses it in a considered way. Every issue is printed on a different colored paper. The first few issues end with incomplete sentences. One must imagine their different color signatures stitched together in the bounds of a book, so that the title plastered upon the following cover, on the imagined adjacent page - HYPERMUTT - concludes the thought the characters speak. This marks the transition of issue one to issue two, and from issue two to three, but once one becomes used to expecting a certain word, the title shifts, changing the sentences - “some kinda effed up dogtangle” - before the convention of big logo lettering gets dropped altogether with issue 6.

The issues move from one space into another, farther along in time. Besides waiting to see how a sentence will end, there are not cliffhangers that are resolved via continuance of the scene seconds later. True to the minicomic format, each installment explores certain ideas about cartooning in ways that feel self-contained and unique to itself. Issue 5 takes place in the past, and its linework feels a bit more finely etched, the story of a castle-bound princess and her pet dog a bit more classical. Issue 7 leaves behind lettering altogether, including any text  indication that it is issue 7 of Hypermutt by Max Huffman and cost four dollars, to instead convey the barest bits of narrative as decompressed abstractions. As Vernon climbs atop a car with deflated tires to see a dog stampede, we are in a moment where there will be no forward movement, but the shape of pulsing motion still seethes as something to observe. Stitched together, whether in a reader’s mind or a theoretical future binding for easier saleability, like the Hypermutt itself, its mass will contain multitudes.

Like the ego of an individual subsumed into a larger whole, the reader’s expectation that a scene or page serves as a delivery system for a joke dissolves. The intent is still satirical, but as it becomes clear Huffman’s intent on outlining the logic of a world that has long left behind anything reasonable there are fewer panels recognizable as punchlines. He’s making science fiction about a world where corporate adventures have rewired the metaphysics of sky and animal. A reader needs to pay close attention but still make leaps of intuition, assured that what they think might be happening actually is. A child grows up, transitions, but a clone of them in child-form is still running around: This plot point from issue 8, offered with the slimmest glimmer to convey its happening, also offers a metaphor for how the strangeness of the series grows to outstrip the humor though jokes are still present. The same issue, with its extended length, has space for a sequence of reaching into the ineffably alien, and being gripped by a human hand. Such is the series’ sublime pleasure.

The post Hypermutt appeared first on The Comics Journal.