I better admit this upfront: I am a Brent Willis aficionado. From short pieces like Poo Map in Dave Bradbury’s Pictozine to graphic novellas such as the brilliant Battle Van, everything the man does is gold. Willis is unwavering in his quality and also, thankfully for me, his rate of production – he has been churning comics out at speed for a number of years. But, just like a Chateau Laffite or the music of Bruce Springsteen, time has not diminished his powers, only made them more complex.

So it was that I approached Fetus Boy Adventures 11 with high expectations. Fetus Boy Adventures is Willis’ flagship series, showcasing the adventures of the unlikely eponymous hero, whose superpower is that he can turn into a fetus at will (actually, early in the series he was always a fetus, which made it difficult for him to purchase alcohol, but after an encounter with the rakish and villainous Marko, he was rendered adult and had to struggle to retain his fetusy powers.) It is a proving ground for a multi-layered universe of ever widening cast of characters, set in an alternate New Zealand which is not quite the future, but not quite the present either. There are evil doers, like Shifty Shano, BMX Carrot and Light bulb Head, and goodies, my favourite of which is Wallflower Girl, whom nobody notices (that’s her super power.) The goodies all work with F.B. at “M.O.M.W.E,” the Ministry Of Money Wasting Enterprises and periodically they fight, sometimes between each other, sometimes against the government and once against robots. It is all very silly and also very brilliant. Fans of Fetus Boy Adventures will not be disappointed by the 11^th Volume – the first in what promises to be a three parter in which F.B. and his colleges take on some mad, sex crazed military scientists.

Furthermore, those of you who are not fans should become so at once. Fetus Boy Adventures is the South Park of New Zealand comics. Nothing – neither members of parliament nor sex, neither fart jokes nor consumer culture is sacred. To miss out on Fetus Boy is to miss out on life! There! I said it, and I shan’t be retracting it either. In fact it is my Not So Humble opinion that Willis is perhaps the most proficient and also the most useful satirist in the country at the present time.

I am, however, prepared to acknowledge what a bold claim it is, and prepared to acknowledge all the things I will be required to define in order to make it. For there is something that Willis does that is very particular and very special and it all comes down to this notion of sacredness. You see, at the time, I wrote that line without thinking – it's something of a literary cliché: nothing is sacred. A certain irreverence of author implied. A social conscience perhaps, or at least a social awareness, for one cannot satirize without paying serious attention. Willis does have both of these things, and displays them with gusto across the breadth of the Fetus Boy series, as well as in his other works, most notably Maggot which was concerned with race and class in New Zealand, but expressed through insects.

Insects aside, in this context, sacredness concerns those aspects of society and ideology which are held to be objectively true. If something cannot be questioned, then anybody, by questioning it, thus bringing in to light that it is subjectively rather than objectively true, automatically renders it from sacred unto unsacredness. In Fetus Boy 11, Helen Clark, David Benson-Pope and Dover Samuels are individually lampooned, Parliament is shown as not only dysfunctional but actively anti-functional. Government appears as a silly game. And while the functionality of government is not a “sacred truth” to all you hip arty folks, it does have an objective truth-y style sacredness to it in the sense that, like it or not, New Zealand is run and regulated by a government. We criticize, but then we do more or less what we’re told to do. We pay taxes. We go to work. Like, when was the last time you personally participated in an armed revolution? And, actually, even if government in New Zealand had been wandering down the path to unsacredness, some sharp new laws have been instituted to make it shiny and new again – the bill forbidding the photography of MPs in session for satirical purposes, for example. There are, so far as I am aware, no especial restrictions on cartoonists (although some interpretations of the brand spanking Electoral Finance Bill suggest there are, or could be, some restrictions for cartoonists on political content.) Nevertheless, that Willis has always criticized as well as trivialized the importance of parliament and has not relented as the times become all the more restrictive marks him as someone who is in the habit of rendering things unsacred. He is, it would seem, not only as a satirist of the first degree but a bloody subversive one.

Having said this, the purposes of satire as subversion of government is a many splendored argument. One might, and reasonably, argue that allowing the peasants to engage in satire is a good way of allowing them let off steam so one shan’t be overthrown. Smart leaders encourage criticism therefore it is possible that by using criticism as part of a joke in a story,  Willis is not rendering the sacredness of parliament unto unsacredness, but in fact participating IN the sacredness itself by re-presenting the idea that it’s okay for us to have leaders that are so fallible. In this line of argument, satire based on content is funny but not particularly subversive at all. It looks subversive, to be sure, but it might not actually be so. It was, if I am not horribly mistaken, Louis Althusser who wrote that the power of the state apparatus to absorb revolutionary content is beyond comparison.[1] Simply, you can write as many-anti sacredness stories as you want – the apparatus is older, bigger and far, far uglier than you will ever be. Go ahead, write 1984. But the thing is that eventually there will be the T.V. show Big Brother.

There is something about Willis’ work that drips subversiveness, though, and having exhausted the avenue of narrative content, I’m going to need to look elsewhere for explanation. Luckily, Willis is not only in the habit of rendering things unsacred, he is in the habit of doing so literally – he actually renders things unsacred, in the sense that his drawing style, or rendering, which is rough, deliberately unpolished with crooked lines and crossed out typos, directly engages the sacred truths of the comics profession Willis (I should point out in all this that Willis’ style is by no means accidental. His command of visual language is wonderful, the characters are brilliantly expressive, and his use of grey washes in Fetus Boy 11 is very pleasing.) But at any rate, Willis is by no means the first or the only person to utilize what he calls the “rough aesthetic” in his work. In fact, there’s been something of a revolution in the availability of comics that look nothing like those churned from the publishing houses. However, when coupled with the way in which Willis publishes and presents the comics for sale - Fetus Boy Adventures is traditionally A4 in size, with a simple colour cover and is stapled down the side of the front rather than on the spine – it is apparent that Willis courts this tension willingly. 'Roughness,' wrote Willis in an artist statement I once published in the Wanker’s Digest as part some comics rambling I was doing at the time, ' is ... subversive, anti-elitist and also way cooler. It is of the proletariat, the underdogs, the untrained, the less advantaged. It is also symbolic of freedom, of setting your own standards and rejecting those of the establishment.’[2]

As Phylis Johnson writes in her Latento, a short summation of Marxist theory and theorists in relation to the production of art, if one wants to take a crack at the state, one needs to ‘subvert (the state apparatus) in textual representations, objects, and philosophies …You create texts which show the audience that they are constructed, which cannot be read any other way, which never allow us to forget, which never allow us to get too relaxed.’[3]  I mention Johnson here because her work, when applied to Willis’ approach to both content and packaging highlights the true subversiveness of both Fetus Boy and Willis. It’s not that he challenges the government; it’s that he directly challenges the notions of what a “published author” actually entails. The work would do this anyway, but as Willis points out, he’s not trying to fool you into thinking his work is published by printing press. It’s not a book. Fuck the book! This is, in Willis’ words, ‘way cooler.’  

So – Willis is, in his own words, a subversive artist. His biting content and anarchic form reflect this attitude and make for extremely enjoyable reading, but the form especially prohibits his work from being wholly absorbed into the mainstream. The voice of the self-critical author which is a subtle but constant presence (READ those prefaces, people. Laffs aplenty,) is a continuous reminder that the work was made by human and not committee. One could, however, make this argument about nearly any self-published artist. To get at the true specialness of Fetus Boy Adventures a little more attention is required.

Like most underground cartoonists (myself included,) Willis doesn’t pretend to be in the employ of anyone other than himself, and in consequence, he doesn’t sell enough of these things to make a living off it. He’s not a household name, and while he’s probably one of the best sellers in places like the New Zealand Comics Festival, like most of us, the bulk of his sales are to people he already knows. To quote Phylis Johnson again, if  ‘you make texts in which the “means of production” are visible as “producing meaning,” the representation visible as a sense of repression, the sign visible as a sign… then you will have an audience of ten, and ten alone.’[4] Well, Johnson is clearly bang on the money in Willis’ case (assuming, or course, that the audience of “ten” is a ballpark figure rather than a non-negotiable absolute.) The problem is if Willis intends Fetus Boy Adventures to be a subversive series of work, how can he ensure that it actually functions as subversive if nobody’s reading it? 

I’m thinking about this a lot at the moment. Right now, one of the problem cartoonists are dealing with is this: How do we break the cycle of preaching to the choir? For some of us, it’s just about sales, but it comes from the same root. How do we take subversion from being a mere device of content and form and make of it something sticky enough to jam between the iron cogs of the state apparatus? Or, more simply (and less evangelically) how do we make acts of subversion into something that actually subverts?

Well, that’s why Willis is the very best. He does not have thousands of readers but he is the only artist I know who inspires people whose have never drawn comics before to make comics for the first time – and not to practice until they can draw Spiderman, but to draw, photocopy and publish comics of their own without fear and without apology. I have seen this first hand in my 12 year old sister-in-law, who published the first volume of her comic Foodtown a year ago and has never looked back since. Willis is her hero, and according to the goss, he has slowly become the hero of her wider circle of friends. Now they have a group where they draw comics together. I am told it spreads still further yet (I’m sure I’ll hear the full report over family X-mas.) At any rate, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this is unbelievably awesome.

Not only is it awesome, but according to Walter Benjamin (by way of Phyllis Johnson,) this is pretty much exactly what it takes to be truly subversive. If you really want to make something that will fuck shit up for all eternity, you’ve got make the means of production visible, as Willis is wont to do. The aim is to produce more producers rather than produce more product – thus spreading the idea in a kind of encoded package, something the forces of the Establishment can’t tamper with.[5] In short, Willis is not only making comics which are good and readable and very funny, but he is making a new generation of self-confident young artists. Fetus Boy Adventures 11 is but the latest in a long line of truly splendid and hilarious works from one of my favourite artists. It, and its maker, are subversive as all hell.

So basically, it’s like this: if you want to stick to the man, accept no substitutes. Fetus Boy Adventures is attractively priced (around the $3.00 mark) and can be purchased from ‘Graphic’ in Wellington, and sometimes ‘Heroes for Sale’ in Palmerston North. Also, for the full back catalogue, you’d be best to contact B.C.W. Publishing, details above. Also, stay tuned for Fetus Boy Adventures number 12 which has just been completed, and will be hitting the stores within the week.
 

[1] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)” in Slavoj Zizek (ed.), Mapping Ideology (Verso, 1994).

[2] Brent Willis, Other reasons for my roughness, 2007 go here for more information

[3] Phylis Johnson, Latento 01, (unpublished,) 2000

[4] Ibid

[5] More from Phylis’ Latento 01

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