Coin-Op #10: Wet Cement. New York. Co-Op Books, 50pp, $19.95
Review by Paul Buhle
Unbeknownst to me, a sister-brother creative team, comic artists Maria and Peter Hoey, have been dipping into a kind of Surrealism (by their own account) in their Coin-Op series. This short-book-length issue recalls immediately the themes of loneliness in modern life, dramatized in the work of Chris Ware and among others, the Canadian artist who calls himself Seth. Their comic panels exude cold, the coldness of a vanished era of popular culture.
From Coin-Op #10: Wet Cement.
I do not think that Ware, who has done a lot with the Superman mythos— more or less merging it with absent-parenthood—or Seth have ventured far into the realm of Surreailsm. But this is an issue deserving more discussion in the Hoeys’ work and Surrealist history-at-large.
Dadaists famously put scraps of daily life into new patterns, opening up the art world in new ways. Surrealists, distancing themselves from their precursors (with some personnel overlap), placed the dream and the unconscious at the center or their own vision of art and the possibilities that it raised for changing society dramatically…and for living differently as part of the change.
The opening chapter of Surrealism famously ended by 1941 or so, when Fascism spread world war and the Popular Front, very much supported by Communists, took over the job of fighting behind the lines. Surrealism no longer seemed so new or so interesting. And then again, a slew of Hollywood films, some of the best of them written by Communists, developed the themes of what French critics (some of them former Surrealists) would hail as film noir.
From Coin-Op #10: Wet Cement.
Noir made vivid sense in the post-war world, especially post-war America, where the idealism of wartime seemed to drain out and be replaced by cynicism, materialist individualism, and corruption. Detective and crime novels published earlier, those of Daniell Hammet in particular, offered a hard-boiled look that invited film adaptation (Hammet himself was teaching at the Jefferson School, a veritable red academy, after mustered out of the Service). Non-political and even right-wing writers and directors reached the same artistic solutions to the alienation of modern life. Even It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), the Christmas classic, could be seen as noir with a happy ending and the banker-swindler of the town as the concentration of everything wrong and corrupt in the wake of Fascism’s defeat.
Decades pass, Surrealist paintings win top honors at global art shows while the revolutionary vision seems ever more obscure, held in literal form by individuals and small groups mostly unrecognized. A new wave of interest, around 1960, is mostly concerned with form and not content, although it serves as a venue for gay and lesbian artists to emerge with their own visions alongside Pop and other influences of the day, shaped in part by the emerging Counter Culture.
The occasional Surrealist writer had been among the enthusiasts of animation, jazz, blues, and comics since the early 1950s. With Franklin Rosemont at the center of the Surrealist group, and revival in Chicago during the middle 1960s, the interest in popular culture and black culture (at the veritable center of Blues culture) emerged anew and with vigor.
Rosemont devoted himself, in critical/celebratory essays, to the likes of Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Bill Holman (Smokey Stover), Basil Wolverton (Powerhouse Pepper) and, above all, Carl Barks (Donald Duck and family) among other comics artists, and to the great animation creators in Hollywood, above all, Tex Avery. It is intriguing that no avowed Surrealist in Rosemont’s circle or elsewhere actually became a comic artist, even as a wide circle of “Underground Comix” notables could, for instance, take part in a Surrealist theme, the one-shot Mondo Snarfo (1978) comes to mind. There, R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, Art Spiegelman and others, including comic publisher-editor-artist Denis Kitchen, here tried their hand at Surrealist ideas and images detached from anything like a formal Surrealist allegiance.
The Hoeys, arguably, have made the connection in Wet Cement. Not with the radical politics and dream-like claims of Surrealists, as such, but with the noir sensibility of the disconnections to reality. Their work, if made as individual comic panels transferred to studio art, could fit comfortably in the Surrealism exhibits that have re-emerged since the 2024 centennial of the founding of the movement in Paris.
From Coin-Op #10: Wet Cement.
It is difficult to make much narrative sense of the Hoeys’ saga of brainwave transmissions (something more and more believable) of secret authorities with sleep walkers’ dreams recorded. Not much more so with a loose plot about an imprisoned lover freed by a techno-marvel, following an insight mysteriously received in a movie theater. And so what.
From Karl Marx Bolan.
An earlier comic in their series, Karl Marx Bolan, has dead Rock ’n Roll stars Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent magically saving a protagonist from an otherwise deadly car crash, prompting the young Bolan into a musical career that overturns the global order and makes him the PM of the United Kingdom! At last, the abysmal Labour Party is overthrown the right way, with left-wing hero Jeremy Corbyn sure to be close at hand.
The Hoeys’ Coin-Op Comics Anthology, 1997-2017 (Top Shelf, 2018) is regrettably out of print, most regrettably because some adventures in prose throw light on their other work. Their repeated treatment of jazz musicians, including the Paris music scene between the Wars, the site of experiments and exiles, is revelatory. Two Hollywood legends, Orson Welles and Nicholas Ray, are also treated with sensitivity, if determinedly avoiding the high days of the Hollywood Left and the consequent Blacklist that shaped and reshaped cinema, from Golden Age to Noir.
In Perpetuity by Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey, 2024.
The Shadower, from Top Shelf Productions, March, 2026.
For classic Surrealists, the plot is overrated anyway. The purposeful flatness of the art, the sense of the unbelievable becoming ordinary works effectively to send the reader into a kind of dreamscape. Just where the artists wish.
