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Moochowski
2 issues self-published of a projected 10-issue series, 2005-.
Category:
humor, slice-of-life.
Author(s):
Lindsay Pollock,
Tom Brass.
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A lot of rich and influential people have a skeleton in their closet... but few have a gay lover in their pool house. Although with all the "I'm a gay American" I hear about, I'm beginning to doubt that. But I digress.
Hermann Wexler, who died at 77, was a lawyer, and a moral pillar of society. The year is 1986, and America is in the grips of Republican Yuppies from Hell, who worship Mammon and have carved up their country well and good (any resemblance with living people being a complete coincidence, of course). So, when Hermann's loving (yeah, right) family discovers that among other things, the patriarch has left them a slacker in his late 30's with whom he shared the last five years of his life, fears of ridicule and loss of influence take control: Felix Moochowski, the secret lover who lives in the pool house, must be prevented from revealing his relationship to the deceased--and can't stay in the house. The two Wexler sons come to an unexpected solution: George, the meek one, will welcome Felix to his home for a few days, while Earl, the complete bastard, will let someone else find enough dirt on Felix to pressure him into silence.
Lindsay Pollock and Tom Brass have crafted a very funny satire of high society mores with their series. The (not so) Young Republicans characters, especially Earl, have no redeeming feature whatsoever, and the humor used against them is rather over-the-top (we see one of them reading about man-hunting safaris, for example), while other characters are given more dimensions. George is one of those, and is shown as having some personality, however crushed it is. Felix is a very interesting character: at first merely the embodiment of everything someone like Earl hates (gay, unemployed, a petty thief), he's shown in the second issue as having really loved Hermann, as unlikely as it seemed at first, and demonstrates some sensibility at various points. Of course, he's the archetype of the trickster, the chaos character who makes everybody question the well-trodden paths they've followed in life. One is reminded of the Terence Stamp character in Pasolini's Theorem, where a polysexual character changed a family by sleeping with all the members (well, it's rather more revolutionary than that). Pollock & Brass seem to have chosen comedy as a genre to tell their story, and they do it in a relentless and at the same time poignant manner.
As for the art, it's also very convincing: highly detailed and rendered, it gives the story the patina of age, as if 1986 was so far away from us that black and white was the only way to recreate that period. As it has often been noticed, taking a few steps back is often a good way of commenting on our present.
With a third issue on the way, I hope we won't have too long to wait to read the next chapter of Moochowski. This is a comic that definitely deserves a wide readership and should appeal to any reader who likes money-obsessed people being lampooned, with a good dose of gay-friendliness thrown in. And who doesn't?
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;void('') "First issue cover")
;void('') "Second issue cover")
;void('') "Moochowski in the pool house, all forlorn")
;void('') "Moochowski and George")