Milky Zest. Steve Hogan. Acid Keg Comics. One-Shot. 2024. 28pp. $5.99
I would never tell Steve Hogan to stop making comics even though this comic book is begging me to do so. Ah, I only kid. I kid in the stubbornly ironic way that Hogan loves. If you followed alt-comics in the ’90s, you know precisely what brand of humor I’m talking about. It permeated the very air. All of hipsterdom worshiped the crass sarcasm tempered by a devastating self-deprecation. That was Gen X sensibility for you. In our youth, we valued spot-on humor and were not overly timid and cautious in its pursuit. It was a certain vibe we were playing with in music, fashion and comics: Peter Bagge’s Hate; Daniel Clowes’s Eightball; Rick Altergott’s Doofus, and so on.
Steve Hogan provides a sharp wit that harkens back to the snarky humor of ’90s alt-comics and makes it his own. At a deeper level, Hogan also honors the respect for craft with spot-on design sense. The antecedents date back even further to mid-century modern, dealing in crisp clean lines and a wry and dry sense of humor, often dealing with wacky and larger-than-life subjects. To engage in this kind of comics as a cartoonist today is certainly tricky. You don’t want to just repeat something that essentially already was a sly post-modern look back. That said, this retro style of comics is totally valid and various contemporary cartoonists work in it to one degree or another: Sammy Harkham and Rich Tomasso are a couple of excellent examples. As you can see from the page excerpt above, and the panel excerpt below, Hogan revels in visual treats and packs in as many added gags as possible.
The story for this comic is a fun MacGuffin-packed roller coaster of a tale. If you like a good comedy thriller with the very fabric of reality at stake, then this is for you. And, along with all the irony, there’s even a sweet romantic subplot. It turns out that our hero, Milky Zest, is a good guy with Tuesday, a good woman, by his side. It’s up to Milky to prove his worth as the newbie at a private detective agency. Little did he know that he would end up in the thick of a case with earth-shattering repercussions. Yeah, that sounds about right. All in all, I enjoyed this comic and, without a hint of irony, I look forward to what Steve Hogan does next.
