Uncle Sam's Kids Hee-Hee, Bogeyman, and Honky

COMIC BOOKS were written for escapists. You had to be willing to go more than half-way to sweat through Superman's struggle with Dr. Galiogne stretched over four issues, or The Masked Marvel's duel to the death with The Incredible Hydro-Man. But once you were there, they never let you down and the heroes of these super-worlds were soon embedded in America's collective imagery.

Comic books became so popular in the fifties that a Congressional investigation was ordered to study their influence on children. When a psychiatrist quoted a boy who had been exposed to comics as saying, "I want to be a sex maniac when I grow up," all the worst suspicions were confirmed.

A new comic book series inaugurated this month will do nothing to erase the suspicions. HEE HEE Bogeyman, and Honky Tonk, all published by Company and Sons, an underground company, are directed at the young freak audience that finds Robert Crumb's Head Comix and Felix the Cat less than fascinating, and the traditional Dell and Marvel labels absolutely boring. All three assume an acquaintance with hard drugs and are only formally connected with their heroic predecessors. More than surrealistic, gross visual explicitness washes each frame with a desperate finality. Where the cover of Felix the Cat shows Felix and his girlfriend cuddling, Honky Tonk depicts a burly monster wearing spiked knuckles and attempting to recover from an axe blow in the head, and that's just the beginning of the ooze. The imagery reaches beyond usual notions of drug-altered experience, to a more fundamental mistrust of people, institutions, and even the artifacts of day-to-day living. It's a Weltanschauung located in a barren urban setting, studded with carnivorous hair-dryers and dish-rag ghouls.

But however absurd carnivorous hair-dryers may sound, horror movies have used equally absurd monsters for years-with the important difference that a considerable amount of energy was expended to demonstrate how these monsters were created, usually through the excesses of modern science. The new freak comics work with a new kind of causality. A beautiful girl is transformed into a princess phone through the psychic projections of rejected lovers. Retributive justice is a persistent theme, but it is never confronted and articulated. Rather the new causality operates as an instantaneous wish-fulfillment never clearly associated with specific characters. It's all more frightening than conventional comics, in part because it seems so close to psychopathology, but also because you can't help wondering a little about your phone.

All three of the comics deal with the problems of drug use, but Bogeyman, more than the others, focuses on the end points of speed and heroin addiction. In its "Hall of Infamy," a monthly feature on California's most strung-out freaks, the inaugural member is "Scorpion," who has just hacked his way out of the head of his alternate identity, Huey Lincoln Smith (1942-1969). He is pictured standing inside a ruptured skull, still holding the axe. The split-head image recurs in a story called "Last Hit." A girl shoots up and frazzles her mind until woolly monsters push through the top of her skull. The artwork in Bogeyman is the best in the series, coming to an uncanny height in the gaunt faces of terminal addicts, particularly a drawing of a boy who has discovered the pusher has given him crystalline battery acid instead of heroin.

Honky Tonk is a drug-culture parody of older comic book forms and advertising techniques. Sandwiched between the two principal stories, a full-page ad, layed-out with True Grit's promos, boasts. "Get both spending money and a real high!" The serious kid with shoulder satchels full of newspapers has been replaced by a freak holding a lid. The caption reads, "Percy Sibbin makes $500 a week and is always stoned!" Unfortunately, much of the remainder of the comic is more self-indulgent mockery than readable satire. In the lead story, "An Okie from Waskogie," Sodmind Redneck is drinking with the boys when acid somehow falls into his glass of white lightning'. "The Return of Wong" is a Kong-like monster returning to defecate on New York City. The final story, "Pamela," traces a woman of fashion going to the beauty salon and being summarily eaten by a hair-dryer.

Though less sensational than the two other freak comics, HEE HEE's artwork is uneven and lacks even a minimal thematic continuity. From titles like "Voyage to See What's on the Bottom of the Toilet Bowl" and "The Man Who Bites," the comic sounded like an instant winner, but both stories are incomprehensible jumbles of Martian deserts and bathrooms. Others include a giant mouse that chases both Americans and the Viet Cong out of Vietnam and a scientist who tries to change the direction of Western culture by involving everyone in a game he calls "Life." The best story of this unexceptional collection is titled 'Forbidden Planet." Intergalactic warriors plan to destroy the earth by giving a small switch-box to a human, with the warning not to pull the switch. They fly out of range and wait for the inevitable, but they haven't counted on anomie. With a shrug the guy throws the box into the river and walks off.

For years comic book fantasies have been a repository for wishes and dreams. But the HEE HEE, Honky Tonk, and Bogeyman series indicates things are different now. All the silly rules are down. Comics are coming to tell you about the dark side of your mind.