ELEPHANT MAN

Greg Houston is back again after the triumph of his outlandish blaxploitation expose, Vatican Hustle (see Opus 253 in the Usual Place), with Elephant Man (80 6x9-inch pages, b/w; NBM  paperback, $9.99), a send-up of superhero comics starring Jon Merrick, perhaps the famed deformity of the 19^th century, who, in his effort to save Baltimore (Houston’s home town, by the way) from the Priest, the Rabbi and the Duck (a trio of unlikely comrades that have become fused together into a single crime wave with three heads through the malfunction of a fiendish scientific device), is undermined at every opportunity by a self-important tv newsman, Dick Denton, eager to prove Elephant Man is all phony and no pony. The so-called plot comes unraveled rapidly, page by page, creating havoc and hilarity on its way through an unlikely romance between EM and the beauteously buxom Tracie J. Bombasso, girl reporter, who decides she’d rather have as a boyfriend a man who can remember her birthday than a deeply tanned, bushy-eyebrowed handsome matinee idol like Denton.

Houston’s haywire drawing technique, spewing distortion and loose-ends, lends its maverick visualization to this equally off-beat tale in a graphic novel that dares to use the word “peckish.” Houston’s work is perhaps best understood as the logical insane extension, in picture and plot, of what “cartooning” once was when Milt Gross and George Carlson were both practicing their craft at the same time. Now, it’s up to Houston. But you have to see it to believe it, so I’ve included a few visual fragments here.