Simon Hanselmann, _Megahex_

 HERE I AM, getting tips on great comics from the New York Review of Books. A welcome new direction for them, a sad reminder of how old I am getting for me.

Megg, a witch, and Mogg, her cat familiar, share with Owl a run-down house or apartment where they sometimes entertain guests such as Werewolf Jones, who will try anything once. Hanselmann was born in Tasmania and lived in Melbourne and the time he made the comics in this volume, but the city in which Megg and Mogg live could be about anywhere in the English-speaking world. 

Megg, Mogg, and their friends are fairly committed drug and alcohol users, and the stories have an appropriate snail's-pace, zoned-out, anti-climactic feel. Hanselmann is partial to a page of twelve equal-size panels and uses a line of unvarying thickness and watercolor, all of which lend themselves to the time-stands-still world of everyone in the room being ripped out of their gourd.  

The characters do not do a heck of a lot--they mostly watch TV and play practical jokes on each other. When they do leave the house, they tend to find themselves in awkward, unpleasant scenes. Owl is the only one with a job.

What seems truest-to-life about Hanselmann's depiction of this world, and genuinely insightful, is that the other characters like Owl well enough, but consider him a dupe and a fool. Owl--who pays most of the rent, who hopes to get a promotion or a better job, who sometimes tries to quit using--is the butt of most of the jokes and pranks, the one the others regards as clueless. That is, the one character who seems to have some slight purchase on consensus social reality is, to the other characters, ridiculous.

There seems to be something profoundly accurate here--that druggies, objects of the scorn and pity of the straights, in turn feel scorn and pity for the straights. 

As far as most of the world is concerned, Megg and Mogg and most of their friends are losers, wasteoids, parasites, a disgrace--but to themselves, they are the wised-up ones, the ones who have seen through the illusions of the goals and ambitions that were offered to them, who were too intelligent to take society's bait.