Not Red Deeps! by Sean Azzopardi
I’m impressed by the honesty and emotional truth of this very personal comic by Sean Azzopardi. He personally handed me a copy in Harrogate at the Thought Bubble fair in November, when there was a lull on Sunday morning. I never read his other books, and don’t know if this one is representative of his overall work. He is quite open about his medical condition, telling me on the day about his disappointing experiences with hypnotherapy. “I suppose it might have some value for helping people give up smoking or similar habits,” he said. “It didn’t work for me.”
It seems just about everything – and everybody – has failed Sean, if the pages of No Red Deeps speak true. As he guides us through a swift tour of his sufferings since earliest childhood to adult life, it’s plain that all the grown-ups in the room are pretty much unable to do anything. Parents, teachers, doctors, health care professionals, and even an outlier healer with their electrical brass rod, may utter well-intentioned words of compassion and professional insight, but can’t do anything to cure the poor protagonist here. At the end of the story, he’s all but left alone, discussing his bleak prospects with a room-mate; but our hero is now all but resigned to dying alone. “Who would even care?” is the subtext of the depressing takeaway.
So much for the humans in this story. The real star of the book might just be the disease that torments our man – it is silent, its very name and diagnosis slow in appearing, but it holds a near-total dominion. It manifests itself in horrifying visions – the most memorable being the hallucinogenic centre spread image. It propels the story, and exerts complete control over the hero’s body, more insatiable than any entry in the “body horror” canon of movies we’ve seen since Cronenberg and Carpenter started to repel squeamish viewers in the 1980s with their hideous corporeal contortions. The disease also manifests itself as a rash, which “infects” almost every panel on every page in the book; a red blotch printed as an abstract layer in the background, insisting on its presence, reminding us that it won’t go away. Visually, Azzopardi has found a memorable and effective way to convey something about his continual torment. It’s so palpable the reader might even feel the condition passing on to us, transmitting right through the paper onto our fingers as we turn the pages.
As a self-portrait, this comic is also pretty unflattering; the artist is remorseless in confessing the extent of the trauma, showing himself helpless, weeping, hysterical, sullen, pushing away those who might offer help. Only by the end of this story does he appear resigned to his fate, but it’s at the cost of making a friend of the grim reaper, and incorporating pain and suffering in a very stoic manner. Yet even here he refuses to depict himself as a hero who made it through, which is how a more sentimental creator might approach the subject.
This made me think of the “slice of life” comics which I knew in the 1980s and 1990s, a strain of the culture which almost established itself as a “genre” in small press and independent comics. In the UK, Eddie Campbell was a pioneer of it, borrowing form and technique from Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac as he retold his picaresque adventures. In the US, we had Harvey Pekar, and later Joe Matt, Michael Dougan and Dennis Eichhorn. The extent to which I ever derived much pleasure from such comics was proportional to how much reflection had taken place; in some cases, very little, and I sometimes felt the artists hadn’t really learned any life lessons from their experiences. It hadn’t deepened them, in other words. Evidently, they thought it was sufficient to just set it down exactly as it happened, and let others make of it what they will. It’s also not unthinkable that the stories were tweaked in the telling, depending on the ego of the writer who wanted themselves to come out a winner.
Sean Azzopardi’s book represents an advance on all the above; compared to many of those comics, his work is rawer, more emotional, more honest, and extremely cathartic. He’s also managed to keep it concise, telling a dense story at a rapid rate with a minimum of discourse; and he’s found ways to sublimate his pain through moments of fantasy and imaginative imagery, processing even the most hideous aspects of this unwelcome disease. A tough read, perhaps, but it’s got the kind of gritty truth that has been systematically bled out of mainstream media (TV, movies, comics) and continues to thrive, unadulterated, in the small press arena.
£6.00 from phatcomics
All images in this post COPYRIGHT © 2024 by Sean Azzopardi