Remember your favorite TV show or movie when you were younger and how it made you feel?  And remember watching it again years later and thinking “What was I thinking?  This sucks!” (Welcome Back Kotter I’m looking at YOU).  After this happened to me I decided to not ruin my childhood memories by revisiting them.

Well when Fever came around I was so excited to see Brendan McCarthy again I grabbed that book as fast as I could.  After all he was drawing my favorite Marvel character -Dr. Strange!  The character he was born to draw.  I thought that back in ’84 when I picked up Strange Days with McCarthy’s unique style of Hallucinogenic art.  Wait.  1984?  That was 26 years ago.  My vow!  It’s too late, I’ve opened the book.  I’ve read it.  And you know what?  It was perfect.

McCarthy never wrote the strongest story, but that’s what enhanced his art.  It is a layered fantasy/nightmare/epiphany that attracts and repulses as it soothes and attacks you. You could balk at a contrived coincidence here, or a lapse in a character’s voice or motivation there, but so what.  Do you dismiss a dream because there’s no way you wouldn’t have made it all the way to school without noticing you didn’t have your pants on?  No!  You got to talk about that dream because the no pants part wasn’t the craziest part. The craziest part was that everyone in class had turned into purple lizards -and you were going to play ‘Whack-a-Mole’ with them. With a piece of ham.

This is what McCarthy is all about.  This guy draws a Ditko dimension just as crazy as Ditko ever did, but the craziest thing is in the story there’s a man/monkey/dog thing with yellow skin and blue-green lips that looked like they were tattooed that color. And that’s not even the craziest thing!  And did you ever see someone draw a Manhattan so perfect in look and feel without actually showing any unique landmark of the city? 

I can’t give McCarthy a five for story, because it really relies on his art to make it the masterpiece it is. And it is a masterpiece.

Remember -Michelangenelo can paint a picture of hell, but Bosch puts a piece of hell on canvas.