Ooh Hicksville! I too discovered this in a library kind of by accident about 20 years ago and loved it -instant top 10 comic for me. I bought and re-read it about 10 years later and while it's still good it fell a little bit in my estimation.
I may have skimmed over it in your write-up but to my memory, one of the main strands of the story is all about the creators of and success stories of comics, some of them real ones, but mostly fictional Marvel/DC analogue comics. And, as I've both read more comics (esepcially superhero comics), I've somewhat changed in my opinions about what matters in terms of creativity / originality. Current me is quite a bit less angry about it all than I guess Mr Horrocks was when he first wrote Hicksville.
Anyway, the good: it's a well-told tale with loads of great characters. The idea of Hicksville - a small town where everyone loves comics so much they all dress up as characters for an annula party, and have the ultimate comic library, is a glorious fantasy I love spending time in.
The bad: a big part of the story is about how one comics creator was a not-nice man who abused his co-workers and took credit he didn't deserve. All well and good, but unfortunately Horrocks chose, as a representative of a good and wholesome comics legend who would never do this, Hergé. When, sadly, this is not quite true. So Horrocks rather undermines his whole story about well-informed comics historians / moral scolds, by not being one himself.
(You don't have to read many books about Tintin and his creator to learn that, although he IS the genius behind the original strips and the storylines, by the time the albums were being collected in colour, it was mostly a team of other artists doing all the hard work... shades of Stan Lee et al. Not saying he's a bad dude, but not a good enough dude to paint as heroic as he is in Hicksville )
That said, I totally recommend Hicksville, and also the much later and not-really-related story 'Sammy Zabel and his Magic Pen'.
I may have skimmed over it in your write-up but to my memory, one of the main strands of the story is all about the creators of and success stories of comics, some of them real ones, but mostly fictional Marvel/DC analogue comics. And, as I've both read more comics (esepcially superhero comics), I've somewhat changed in my opinions about what matters in terms of creativity / originality. Current me is quite a bit less angry about it all than I guess Mr Horrocks was when he first wrote Hicksville.
Anyway, the good: it's a well-told tale with loads of great characters. The idea of Hicksville - a small town where everyone loves comics so much they all dress up as characters for an annula party, and have the ultimate comic library, is a glorious fantasy I love spending time in.
The bad: a big part of the story is about how one comics creator was a not-nice man who abused his co-workers and took credit he didn't deserve. All well and good, but unfortunately Horrocks chose, as a representative of a good and wholesome comics legend who would never do this, Hergé. When, sadly, this is not quite true. So Horrocks rather undermines his whole story about well-informed comics historians / moral scolds, by not being one himself.
(You don't have to read many books about Tintin and his creator to learn that, although he IS the genius behind the original strips and the storylines, by the time the albums were being collected in colour, it was mostly a team of other artists doing all the hard work... shades of Stan Lee et al. Not saying he's a bad dude, but not a good enough dude to paint as heroic as he is in Hicksville )
That said, I totally recommend Hicksville, and also the much later and not-really-related story 'Sammy Zabel and his Magic Pen'.