Jamie Hewlett
Hewligan’s Haircut

The fauna of De Baser is generally not really young, so it's quite likely that someone remembers Kitchen, the show hosted years ago by Andrea Pezzi. I have the memory of a particular moment where Pezzi explained to the guest of the day a method for understanding cubism that someone from the field taught him: step 1 - take an empty pack of cigarettes and imagine that this is reality as seen by our eyes and as it would be painted, for example, by a landscape painter; done? good, proceed with step 2 - disassemble the package by detaching the glued flaps and unfold it on a table so that it becomes nothing more than a shaped piece of cardboard.

Here, what you see now is reality as a cubist would draw it.

I never understood if the method really works for cubism; rather, I got the idea that it works well for those who want to spread out on comic panels the most hidden places of the human subconscious/dream world.

Places where to the question "what color was Napoleon’s white horse?" it makes perfect sense to answer "black with yellow and blue stripes," places where a desk and a crow actually have something in common, and where Rosalia's joke, where with her industriousness she gets the sheet into Calogero's ass, is still funny.

One can find comics centered on this topic that range from harmless to decidedly less harmless. In the second category, I would include “Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal” by Andrea Pazienza, or “Arzach” by Moebius, for example. Among the harmless ones, I would put this “Hewligan’s Haircut” by Jamie Hewlett (artist) and Peter Milligan (writer), which tells the adventures with a somewhat Gabrielian/Jodorowskian flavor of Hewligan, a former inmate in the "5 Seasons" asylum, playing with the theme of madness in a light way and resorting to massive doses of English-style nonsense and surrealism.

My pupils landed on it at the end of a brief search for some work by Hewlett to read, an artist I really like a lot, known in Italy mainly (I believe) for having created the components of the Gorillaz.

The protagonist's name is a play on words created by combining parts of the names of the two authors so it sounds more or less like “hooligan.”

The story begins with the interview Hewligan has with Dr. Proctor, a guy with ears that dance on his head (or maybe it's Hewligan who sees him that way) to check his health. Trying to tidy up his hair in anticipation of the interview, Hewligan creates a strange hairstyle with a hole in the middle that accidentally has the same shape as the symbol on the power-off button of the frequency modulators of every dimension created by the great creator. Essentially, the presence of the symbol in a given dimension causes the modulators to shut down, making everything in that dimension fall out of harmony.

Hewligan is deemed healthy by Dr. Proctor and can leave the asylum, but he finds himself having to face a world turned upside down by what his hairstyle has caused, where he seems to be the only sane one. He will be tasked with setting things right, helped by someone named Scarlet O'Gasmeter, reality deformer.

I used the terms Gabrielian/Jodorowskian because it's unclear until the end (at least I didn't get it) whether the journey of Hewligan and Scarlet O'Gasmeter is real in the comic, or if it's just an hallucination of the protagonist, somewhat like Rael's journey in the New York of the lamb.