In a time when we seem to be confronting many of the worst elements of 1950s America institutional racism and sexism, white supremacy masquerading as meritocracy, and rampant consumerism, it is somehow soothing to be offered one of the better components of that era. Excellent design. Books where the creators have taken the time to think about presentation. How will the book feel in the hands? How does the subtle nuance of color choices and layout add meaning to the story? Peter and Maria Hoey are a brother and sister team who create lush books, where all of these aspects are well considered. They write, draw, and publish as Coin-Op Books or are published by Top Shelf.
One of the highlights of my trip to San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) last summer was meeting this charming and articulate team at their table.
The range of their subject matter is wide. They often circle around to pop culture, particularly rock, pop, and jazz music, and film noir of the 20th century. However, in their work, there is always a nod to deeper source material: philosophy, Greek myths, Aesop’s fables, Old Testament tales, all made timeless and starkly relevant for today in their deft hands.
At the convention, I purchased three of their 45 RPM comics and two graphic novels, In Perpetuity and Animal Stories. Much to my delight, they have released a new book, Trance Boulevards and Cinema on March 1st, which, along with another book, Coin-Op Comics #5 Plastic Faces, arrived a few days ago.
Coin-Op 45 rpm comics are a delight. Shaped to look like a sleeve with a vinyl single, each 12-page comic is a story or series of small factual vignettes related to 20th-century music.
A brief aside. For non-vinyl heads and anyone born in this century it should be noted that before music was widely available on “compact discs” (CDs) or streaming services, it was available for home listening on discs made of (historically) shellac or, beginning in the 1960s, the lighter weight and sturdier polyvinyl chloride (PVC). They were generally available in two main sizes. Twelve-inch discs known as “long play” or LPs, which rotated at 33 1/3 rotations per minute (RPM), allowing a diamond needle to decode the physical groove into sound waves, or 7-inches which generally played a single song per side and rotated at 45 RPM.
Blacktop Mourning (They Died by Night) tells 13 single-paragraph narratives about the highway deaths of (mostly very young) musicians. It starts with blues vocalist Bessie Smith in 1937 and ends with rocker D. Boone in 1985. They have drawn greyscale images of each artist, and recounted their hits, their genre, and the known or surmised events of their last ride.
Dial 9 (For an Outside Line) is a 45 rpm comic that tips a hat to a time when hotels had switchboards that allowed a person to call outside of the building by dialing 9 to get an operator, or, in later years, to be switched into an external call system. Each brief vignette tells of a music-related event that took place in a hotel room. Sadly, too many of them are deaths by overdose. The teal and almost sepia-toned words and images are layered and poignant.
Karl Marx Bolan is a surreal tale involving the ghosts of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, their bartender Karl Marx, and a very trippy spin on alternate history. Marc Bolan, the fall of the USSR, and the 1980 presidential election are at play. Walter Cronkite and Elvis make appearances. No spoilers here, but, suffice to say, the very standard comic format layout acts as a buffer against the fantastical elements of this ghost story.
Coin Op Comics #5 – Plastic Faces is an anthology of stories that vary widely in tone and methods of execution. Some use the classic nine or twelve even-sized panel layout to tell a story where each page is a single image, but each frame advances the story with a different piece of the puzzle. It opens with the intriguing Au Privave. All of the dialog/ thoughts float in the top three frames of each page, roughly corresponding to the frames below. The Windy Parade uses the same static layout with 12 frames per page. Both stories have a slightly voyeuristic feel, as events unfold viewed through windows or the crane shot view of happenings on the street.
Saltz and Pepz are two anthropomorphic, dog-like charlatans that are reminiscent of Bimbo or Pudgy from the Fleischer cartoons, but seem to get into much worse fixes. This time, in this anthology, they run afoul of the U.S. mint in a short caper called Saltz and Pepz We’re On the Money.
The Trials of Orson Welles Twice Nightly is another story therein. Fans of Orson Welles’ life and films will enjoy the noir meets newsreel tale that pits the director against many of his films’ characters in a variety of their locations. This is one of the stories that gives you enough to enjoy the mystery and adventure, but is enhanced by knowing the films. It made me want to revisit all of his movies. Much of it is black and white filmmaking at its very best, utilizing the limitations of the medium to enhance the story and experience — a skill that the Hoey sibs demonstrate to make full use of what comics can do that nothing else can.
And finally, the story The Interoffice Memo takes a cubicle worker on a surreal journey to the systems administration office. In true comic book fashion, it ends with a cliff-hanger.
This single book offers the widest range, yet most concise display of the Hoeys’ multifaceted approach to visual storytelling.
In 2022, Top Shelf collected many of the Coin-Op comics into a graphic novel. Their first full-length book composed as a graphic novel, Animal Stories, is an anthology of stories that are woven together. The book begins with a young woman who keeps pigeons and discovers an extra bird showing up with her flock. The pigeon wears a little band to carry messages. She begins an adventure to find the person who is sending her notes, via the pigeon. Her search takes her to pet stores, to a hardware store, and, ultimately, to a lonely house. Each further tale is somehow linked to some person, creature, or event in the first story, some intimately and some only by the fact that they live and work in the same neighborhood. There are mysteries and allegories, bible stories retold, and cautionary tales of human hubris and human folly. Each story has some element of the layout that is unique, but the feel of the book is much more contained and united than the Coin-Op Comics anthologies.
In Perpetuity, also from Top Shelf in 2024, is their next foray into the graphic novel. This book is another testament to their design ethos. It is beautifully laid out. The book takes place in two different dimensions – the world of the living and the afterlife. The pages behind the panels in the afterlife, where the story begins, are grey, lending a certain bleakness. The pages behind the panels in the world of the living are bright yellow and the general palette is more cheerful.
The story follows the risky ventures of Jim, a dead musician. The mobsters who killed him have now commandeered him into a scheme to traffic money from the afterlife into the world of the living. Jim involves Olive, a living woman unfortunate enough to be having a near death experience, when he is looking for a mule on the “other side.” When he is caught, the underworld police set him up to be their mole in a more grandiose trafficking plot. Jim and Olive seem to be pawns for larger and larger players, ultimately confronting Hades himself. In the tradition of Greek theater, there is comedy, tragedy, and, in the end, everyone is still being played by the Gods.
The Hoeys’ most recent offering is Trance Boulevards and Cinema. It is a prose poem in graphic form. It combines well-rendered, debris-free drawings of streets, highways, iconic buildings of Los Angeles, and sparsely populated with cars from Hollywood’s heydays – the 1940s, 50s and 60s, that are interspersed with poetic musing on the seductive power of movies on the big screen and faint impressions of the physical artifacts of film. Just when I think I’ve seen all it has to offer, I open it again and recognize an implied face or understand why that list of titles is paired with particular images. Like the title implies, there is a trance-like, meditative feel to the greyscale pages of this 20-page and very worthwhile volume.
The Hoeys do not shy away from nuance. While their worlds may have the feel of midcentury modern, they are populated with complex, diverse characters. The clean lines and precise layouts are often a veneer over dreamy, poetic, or even sinister undercurrents. It is easy to get sucked into the story. But days later, it can be hard to get the echoes and ramifications of the story out of your mind — a testament to their talent and artistry.
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