The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil
Stephen Collins
Jonathan Cape, 240pp, £16.99
Stephen Collins is the creator of what is perhaps my favourite newspaper cartoon ever. Published in the Guardian last year, it features Michael Gove and David Cameron arguing about how best to respond to an alien invasion. The caricatures are spot-on, the “acting” (as it were) tells as much as the words, and the humour is a finely balanced mixture of political satire and nonsensical lunacy. It’s what I imagine Steve Bell’s If… feels like for people who’ve been reading it non-stop for thirty years, the only subsection of society able to get the the byzantine in-jokes, and well-enough inured against the scatological puns to survive them.
So I was excited to see Collins’ debut graphic novel arrive on my desk. It’s less political than some of his strips, focusing instead on the absurdist humour that makes pieces like I tried to cancel my gym membership and Don’t wake up work so well; but despite the fact that there’s no politicians caricatured, it still reads as a fable for our times.
Dave lives Here. The important thing about Here is that it’s an island in the middle of The Sea, and somewhere past the edge of The Sea is There. The people of Here don’t like There. Because Here is orderly, neat, and predictable, and There is everything Here isn’t.
But Here is also beardless. So when Dave – Dave who makes charts for a company whose business he doesn’t understand, Dave who is completely bald save for one thick hair on his lip, Dave who has listened to the Bangles’ Eternal Flame 427,096,483 times – suddenly sprouts an enormous beard that can’t be cut, won’t stop growing, and just seems slightly evil, Here goes mad over it.
The book is rendered in soft pencil, black and white throughout, but printed to a huge size (almost bookshelf-busting, so be warned there), which gives Collins a chance to express tremendous versatility. The orderly nature of Here in the early half of the book is expressed with a high – almost Chris-Ware-high at times – panel count, and as the squares of the panels blur into the lines of the grid system of houses, the sort of world Dave lives in becomes apparent. And then, after one full-page spread early on shows the windowless walls of the houses on the coast of Here facing out to the sea, we see our first glimpse of There. The panel boarders drop away, and drawn in black on top of black is the chaos the residents fear.
As well as high panel counts, the huge book allows Collins to use another effect to great success: a couple of pages in the book are nearly blank, except for one speech balloon or caption. It’s a relatively standard technique, except that as the pages get bigger, the text has been shrunk – leading to a feeling of the reader drowning in the absence of information. Something which Dave, faced with his inexplicable beard, knows only too well.
The obligatory art paragraphs also can’t end without a mention of the book’s coda. It’s hard to discuss in too much detail – the story’s not plot-heavy, but it still wouldn’t do to give away the ending – but as a character leaves hand-drawn pictures behind on their journey, we see the last few notes found, pasted into a scrapbook and illustrating, maddeningly vaguely, what came next for them. The pictures fade to black, and then, in the very last one, a hint of something else appears…
Taken overall, it reminds me of nothing so much as a Roald Dahl novel: a surreal premise, presented as matter-of-factly as possible, which, if you buy into it – as children do naturally, and adults who know whats-what do too – presents the opportunity for a piece of strong character work. This isn’t a book for children, the oblique references to the Bangles and self-help gurus make that clear, but it is childlike in the best way. Which is what you’d expect from a man who drew a cartoon about the High Speed Beyoncé, really.
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