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TEPID Summer 2003
($5.00 ppd from John Hankiewicz / 18 W. Traube Ave. / Westmont, IL / 60559 USA. Web:
www.geocities.com/tepidcomic)
Review by Mike Hunter
Impressively presented in an 8 1/2" x 11" size, with heavy paper stock – the title received a publication grant from the Xeric foundation – John Hankiewicz's
Tepid is likely one of the most
difficult comics you'll ever encounter. Several issues have been produced over the years, apparently similar in challenging structure and surreality (this is the first
Tepid I've seen). The story in this issue is titled "The Element of Surprise," and symbols that recur within are ice, eyes, ice
cream, broken windows, baseball, and, um, athletic cups. (I kid you not!) The tale – more of an unsettling, multilayered mood piece, a meditation, really – begins with a baseball crashing through the window of a ship anchored amid an Arctic expanse of ice. Attired in shorts, t-shirt and baseball cap, Eleanor, a dark-haired girl (who significantly looks just the same as in flashback scenes, set many years before) strolls on the ice, encountering a dessicated carcass and briefly placing a baseball in its empty left eye socket. A narrator speculates if she thinks of him, if her memories of him "yield...a person fully resembling the old me, or else a fully new version of me..."
Intertwining stories of two "versions" of baseball players, one an innocent-looking, twelve-year-old lad who's never shown speaking, another a sullen, acne-specked young man, play out. Both are considering quitting the little league, both fascinated with Eleanor. The older one, in a car ride to and from the ball field, is revealed to have gone beyond the younger one's more distant infatuation: "I kissed her hair...she promised to buy me a tie," he notes, and has talked about inhabiting a "dream house" with her, and that Eleanor has drawn "...a picture of the baby she wanted to have. Then a picture of the boy the baby would become. Then a picture of me." The older woman (apparently his mother) driving, whose features are a combination of the characteristics of both males, adds a less halcyon detail to the romance: "...you destroyed her dresser with an aluminum bat."
Yet the youth is the only one shown
interacting with Eleanor: he slides the sports section from beneath her sleeping form, she playfully takes his baseball cap, places it atop a vase of flowers, then
punches it, knocking the whole thing over. In a later scene, after throwing a baseball through a window, she'll straighten the vase, place the cap on top, and punch it
again.
Later, the two baseball players toss a ball back and forth. The ball finally heads towards the left eye of the younger one, who is then shown supine in a public restroom, blood on his baseball glove. When he joins the mother and other ball player in the car, it is revealed that eye has vanished: only smooth skin is in its place. His presence is ignored by the others. The older ball player tells how Eleanor, who told him "I come from ice," would touch his forehead with an ice cube. (Earlier, he was shown eating a "helmet sundae," then putting the miniature plastic ball cap the confection came in over his head, runnels of the melted treat going down his face.) The mother continues her reminiscences about the beauty salon she worked at, the Eleanor-obsessed old men whose hair she'd cut, whose emotional distress was soothed by the cold scissors being laid against their heads, one of whom said Eleanor symbolized "...the Element of Surprise."
Towards the end, back in his bedroom, the boy covers his remaining eye with an athletic cup. Eleanor, shown earlier in that same place pensively holding the device, now is seen in the same panel doing that, as two different times overlap yet again in the book. He apparently finds an ice cube melting in a hallway, which Eleanor had thrown there earlier, before going into his bedroom, and which vanishes a few panels later. (In the car, the mother was shown dropping another ice cube out the window.) The narrator recalls, "On the day Eleanor left us, I prayed, 'Dear God, when I am older, grant me indifference'..." After looking at the sports section Eleanor had read, the boy sits at the table where, in alternating panels, the vase with flowers she had knocked over is shown upset, its water spilled, then restored as before, then tipped over again, and finally absent altogether.
John Hankiewicz's depictions of people remind of Jim Blanchard's in their fluid, rubbery quality. As opposed to the protagonists, backgrounds and their textures are meticulously covered in fine ink hatchings, which separate shapes without seeming overly busy. As for the story, there are many
more elements not touched upon here: the strange, overheard coach's speech ("...You can preserve civilization in the amber of your talents..."), prayer, bits of graffiti, the symbolism of the the art in the covers, recurring motifs of windows, vision, and those "windows of the soul," eyes. Those expecting a more conventional narrative, with a satisfying conclusion, will be disappointed. But this issue of
Tepid is nonetheless a remarkably daring, intellectually challenging, and ambitious work, which will reward repeated readings, and highly recommended to those with a taste for the outer frontiers of the art form.
[ Austin readers can find
Tepid at
Funny Papers. ]
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