SUCKLE: THE STATUS OF BASIL

Republication of Cooper's initial graphic novel welcome

By Mike Whybark     June 30, 2002

SUCKLE is the surreal story of a naive youth's journey to self-knowledge and happiness through the fantastic dreamscape of a dystopian city. We meet our protagonist, Basil, as he emerges from a brain-like egg which has been ejected from a vaginal opening in the ground. He wanders, mute and in wonder, until he is fed by a kind woodcutter. Through one misadventure after another, he finds himself in a city, where he becomes infatuated with a hippyish devotee of a religion or cult, undergoes some learning experiences concerning the venality of the city's denizens, and has an emotionally devastating religious experience.

My brief description fails completely to capture the profoundly strange and dreamlike quality of both the plot and the drawings that Cooper creates to move his story along. By largely eschewing dialogue and employing non-rational story elements that may or may not be hallucinatory, he creates a tension and poetry in the tale which brings to mind the work of Jim Woodring.

Although it's clear that Cooper owes a debt to Woodring, one would not mistake the work of one for the other. Cooper is not slavishly imitating Woodring's dreamlike body of work, but adopting techniques that Woodring has explored and developed in order to tell his story. He demonstrates how raw surrealist imagery can enhance and expand the power of a story. However, this work is not a cool, formalistic exploration of these techniques. It's full of humor and energy and it's hard to know how analytic Cooper may have been in developing his vocabulary of the fantastic.

This story, like the last Cooper book I reviewed, (DAN AND LARRY IN DON'T DO THAT), is concerned with the development of an adult's perspective on the world in matters of sexuality and human relationships. Basil is depicted in the story from birth through adolescent independence and undergoes progressive stages of loss of innocence, from wandering wordless in the woods to the verge of a sexually aware mutual relationship with a young woman.

Because of the frank, if wildly surreal and peculiar, depictions of sexual subject matter, this is not a book for young children; the same interest in and discomfort with sexuality present in DAN AND LARRY is here as well. However, in DAN AND LARRY we're presented with a squirmingly uncomfortable look at the implications of certain aspects of comix culture; here, the discomfort is created by the anerotic quality of the drawings themselves: the book depicts sex and sexuality, but it is not about arousal nor intended to arouse.