Review: The Lengths #1, and other comics

Artist(s): Howard Hardiman.

I’d never heard of British artist Howard Hardiman before Jean-Paul Jennequin, my partner in crime at LGBT BD (the French answer to this site), recently told me about buying the first issue of his new self-published comic, The Lengths. Hardiman seems to have already built an audience for himself with his anthropomorphised animals comic Badger1, which I haven’t seen, but what is sure is that The Lengths is a powerful piece of work, dealing with a theme that’s often glamorized, namely the life of hustlers.

The three mini-comics

Before working on this comic, Hardiman had produced a number of gay-themed mini-comics, which he also sells on his site. First are Polaroid From Other Lives, two 12-page comics featuring human protagonists in rather dire situations: one is thinking back to a dead lover, and the other is in a hospital waiting room after a violent attack. Both are poetic and sparse, but the art styles are different: the first one is drawn in a more stylized way than the second one, with text written by hand while the second one has typed text. The effect was that the first one felt very direct and intimate, while the second one, with its careful placement of text and use of full blacks and whites, felt more carefully thought-out, more controlled. Both are moving pieces, as is the third, and small-sized, mini-comic, entitled Guys that died. This one is a real curiosity, illustrating as it does a sad song by the Hungarian group The Unbending Trees, from their album Chemically Happy (Is the New Sad), which you can listen to here. Also gay-themed, this song is about a man dreaming of dead guys who shared his bed.
So, it might be best not to read these comics when you feel depressed, but otherwise, they’re definitely worth your time for their rawness and sincerity.

Eddie/Ford and Nelson

The Lengths certainly doesn’t lack sincerity, either. Based on interviews done by Hardiman a few years ago with men selling sex to men, it tells the story of Eddie, a young gay guy whose need for money leads him to find work as a hustler, using a made-up identity and characteristics (“Let’s give them what they want” seems to work in prostitution as well as in politics or entertainment). What follows is definitely not a gay version of Pretty Woman. Hardiman has made some interesting choices here: he uses anthropomorphised dogs to stand for the men involved, and his storytelling is heavily fragmented, his use of chiaroscuro and dialogue placement reminding me of some manga I’ve seen.
The general atmosphere is rather bleak, but not in a graphic way, more because of the tone of mind of the main protagonist who narrates his own story. Eddie seems lost playing this new, unstable self, and the author conveys the idea of this floating world with a stark imagery—I’m particularly thinking of the chilling, full-pages sequence where we see Eddie setting foot for the first time in a gay brothel, where the boys are lying languidly in poses directly inspired by Gustav Klimt’s work.
I guess The Lengths is not a comic for everybody. But if you’re looking for an unflinching view of a life as seen through a strong artistic viewpoint, you won’t be disappointed.

You can see a 7-page preview of The Lengths #1 here, there’s an interview of Howard Hardiman about this project here, and you can buy this comic on the author’s website.


Notes:
  1. You can listen to a 2008 podcast interview of Hardiman about Badger here, and you can buy it on his website.

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    UPDATE May 2012: The first issue is now available for free online here.


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