Hicksville (comics)

Hicksville (comics)
Cover of the Drawn and Quarterly collected edition
Creator	Dylan Horrocks
Date	1998
Publisher	Black Eye Comics
Original publication
Published in	Pickle
Issues	1-10
Date of publication	1993 – Dec. 1996
Language	English
ISBN	(softcover)

Hicksville is a graphic novel by Dylan Horrocks originally published by Black Eye Comics in 1998.

Much of Hicksville was serialized in Horrocks' 10-issue solo series Pickle, published by Black Eye from 1993–1996. The collected edition, which featured much redrawn art, was released by Black Eye in 1998, shortly before the company went out of business. Hicksville was republished by fellow Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly in 2001 and again in 2010. In 2010 the graphic novel was republished by New Zealand publisher Victoria University Press.

Hicksville has been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, French (L'Association) and Croatian (Fibra).

Canadian writer Leonard Batts arrives in the tiny New Zealand town of Hicksville to research the early life of Dick Burger, whose work has taken the comic book industry by storm. He finds that Hicksville is a town in which everyone from the postman to the farmer is an expert on comics, yet everyone seems to hate Burger. The novel explores the machinations of the comic book industry, and contains a fictionalized account of the history of mainstream American comics, with particular attention paid to the era of Image Comics. Most of the characters are comic creators, and many of their strips are reproduced in full as part of the story, most notably Sam Zabel's extensive account of moving to Los Angeles in order to work with Burger, which he documents in his self-published comic Pickle (the title of the Dylan Horrocks series in which the storyline was actually published).

Derik Badman writes of the village where much of the action takes place:

Hicksville can serve as a metaphor for the artist freed of commercial constraint and popular prejudice (in the case of comics at least). Here is a place where Picasso would actually make comics in honor of George Herriman (creator of Krazy Kat, which the historical Picasso really did read and love), where the local cafe is called “The Rarebit Fiend” (after a Winsor McCay comic strip), and where once a year everyone dresses up as a comics character for the Hogan's Alley party (Hogan’s Alley being the place where The Yellow Kid lived). Here is the place where the great comic artists of the past created the works they wanted to create, rather than working their whole lives on corporate owned properties.