Last Summer at Camp Righteous

A new work by Ollie Hicks! I write this with an exclamation mark, because to me this an obvious social good, but one must assume that some of you — even most of you — who are reading this, are unfamiliar with their previous work. That's a sin. A sin that can still be corrected. “Repent, Harlequin” Said the Comics Critic¹.

The British writer-artist has been doing yeoman’s work for a decade now. Mostly on the small-press side with the retro-ish Sarararara: All American Girl and Butch Bros. There is also the slightly more-mainstream Grand Slam Romance (drawn by Emma Oosterhous), which has the look and feel of these overtly-cutesy YA comics ... until you get to all the magical girl fucking. Even when working with big-name publishers there is always more of David Cronenberg to their work than Raina Telgemeier². 

The recurring themes are: sex and gender experimentation as a way to self discovery; and a retro aesthetic that serves as a mirror to a retro society that holds the protagonists back (emotionally and socially). There’s a whole lot of Archie comics there, Americana at a distance (the same way the early 2000 AD people did Dirty Harry and Rollerball at remove)³.

All of these elements are present in this new graphic novella, available in the UK from Good Comics (I was promised they deliver across the vast ocean). Last Summer at Camp Righteous concerns Charity, an 18-year-old "faith steward" and part of an ultra-religious Christian community, who has one last chance to find a husband in the titular camp, an island far away from the mainland. Instead, she finds herself forced to confront her sexual repression when she’s shacked up with PK, another steward who already well on a journey away from the repressive ideology that guides the camp.

This all has the hallmarks of a very serious and melodramatic work of self-discovery, call it Blankets 2025. But this is a Ollie Hicks production so instead the whole thing is played for laughs. Good laughs too. It takes Charity less than three pages to start sinfully imagining all the lurid acts nonbeliever boys do to non-faithful girls (with her in the center of the panel); PK’s flaunting of both the rules and ideology of the camp, her gender non-conforming dress and behavior, is so obvious that other people just kinda gloss over it most of the time. Then there are the extra-dumb jocks, who are both sex-crazed and completely unaware, basically stumbling their way into homosexuality while trying to engineer themselves into becoming proper chick magnets.

There is certainly an ideological read of Last Summer at Camp Righteous, one probably much needed in today’s political climate, namely that this type of repressive ideology always contains the seeds of its own destruction. The people of Camp Righteous, the upper management who think it as another tool to shepherd the young into their pre-assigned gender roles, have become so closed off from the endless possibilities of the real world, so locked into a binary, that they fail to even conceive of the miniature rebellion occurring right under their noses. This becomes especially potent when coupled with Hicks’ art stylings, which forever evoke a sense of something that came before; through this time they seem to evoke early manga-inspired webcomics⁴ — there’s a lot of shiny starry eyes, mouths open agape, smiles so wide they remind you of a shark, etc.

Still, looking backwards can only take you so far. There is a real problem with a lot of indie stuff that becomes so married to a particular aesthetic movement, or even to a particular person, that it fails to develop into its own. It doesn’t matter if the person you’re copying is Kirby, Gould or Moebius. There are select few who made forward-looking work with their gaze forever in the past ⁵. It would be a really hilarious fault to have in a novella dedicated exactly to outgrowing one’s environment. Thankfully, Last Night at Camp Righteous isn’t locked into a pre-determined form of expression. Sure, there’s that early Archie, these westernized-manga takes, but there’s also some Scott Pilgrim (note the band scenes) and some of the page layouts could come from pen of Paul Grist. Still, these are just influences, rivers flowing into an ocean; this novella shows us an artist still in the process of growing.

Of course, all the serious stuff is just a side dish. Last Summer at Camp Righteous works because the humor never detracts from the "serious" aspect of self-exploration and vice versa: When the two jocks start making out and freak that they might be gay, one of them simply says, “I’ve got an hack,” and reaches with an hand to grab Charity’s breast. It’s funny on the surface, the simple teen-comic staple of "boys are horny," but it’s even funnier because it happens while they keep making out. Charity, still confused about her own tendencies, can’t quite wrap her mind around what’s happening — she’s obviously enjoying being a voyeur, but also keeps thinking in orthodox terms of matrimony under the eyes of god.

Last Night at Camp Righteous plays this confusion to the hilt without quite making the characters the butt of the joke. These are people searching for themselves in a society that hadn’t given them the tools, never mind the freedom, to begin this process. They stumble, face in a pie-style, but rise again. And we enjoy them for their faults while wishing they succeed. It’s a tale as old as time, but Hicks proves there are still good ways to tell it.

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