Back Issues
Heavy Liquid 1-5
By Josh Hechinger
June 19, 2007 - 16:50

DC Comics
Vertigo
Writer(s): Paul Pope
Penciller(s): Paul Pope
Inker(s): Paul Pope



heavyliquid2.jpg
So I’m sitting here, trying to figure out what I can tell you about Heavy Liquid.

I could tell you…

A!) How it turned my brain into an equation:

Brain After Heavy Liquid = Explosions times the variable “S”

(Where “S” is the number of brain-cells I have.)

B!) That Paul Pope’s art looks like someone blew up the comic industries of Europe, Japan, and America, and it’s up to him to keep Comics As We Knew It alive with bits of all three.

(And he could totally do it if that ever happened.)  

C!) How Heavy Liquid’s a sequential essay on art and communication disguised as a game of hide-and-seek on drugs.

(And while I think the description “on drugs”  and it’s variations are painfully overused, the fact that the titular Heavy Liquid is a metal-that-can-also-be-a-drug lets me get away with it. This time.)

D!) That Heavy Liquid infects your brain with spacemen and whitens your teeth while you sleep and cures baldness in babies. That it makes you attractive to the opposite sex and fire lightning bolts from your fingers and whatever else I have to tell you in order to make you read it, because you really ought to.

(One of the above? Actually true.)

E!) And oh, you will want motorcycle boots with pilgrim buckles SO BAD after you read it. And/or a fish-scale shirt. And/or a Picasso mask. And/or a cigarette.

(Wait, what?)

Really, I don’t know what else to tell you. It blew my mind.

Maybe you can tell.


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