This is completely amazing. Never has the nightmarish grotesque been rendered with such perfect beauty of lines and form, or with such poetically suggestive and graceful storytelling. Rickheit manages to push into a heightened onereic madness triangulated by surrealism, psychedelia, and a kind of Crononbergian antiquarian bad science, but, importantly, works it very effectively into a believable, relateable context built of mundane quotedian and psychological details that elevates what some take for finely-wrought but disjointed disturbing imagery into something that for me, was totally tragic and moving. And supposedly this is an attempt to render some kind of autobiographical truth, which really ups the pathos. (may no one ever be devoured by my subconcious, please.)The story is basically a turn-of-the-century coming of age drama about two outsider genius brothers building unusual musical instruments from the, uh, materials at hand. Their art later gets entangled with the demands of adolescence and family in increasingly complicated and unclear ways. And things get weird. Think bits of a hybridized Jim Woodring and Hans Bellmer terror-desire invading everyday reality, and then let the story get dark, dark, dark, and totally unsettling even my jaded conceptions, at times. The crux of this story's un/reality is a tricky concept to disect, but I'll offer a few possibilities: Edmund, the elder brother, seems like he may be more directly in touch with his subconscious than most, than is healthy, to the point that it may be manifesting beneath the family home and between the walls. Or maybe it's more like a collective id between the brothers. The collective unconscious? Or could it be the repressed urges of their long-dead father, still buried after all these years? Or his workshop? Or something that even he did not know about, something primal and arcane, there long before he built the house. If you're the kind of surrealist/symbolist reader that I am, the lack of easy explanation, allowing this multiplication of potential meanings instead of textbook allegorizing, is not a failure, but a clear asset.Art-wise, this is meticulous and ornate, capturing unbelievable constructions with an unmatched literal clarity. The result works in a manner similar to how Poe's extensive detail helps suspend disbelief in his gothic fantastic, perhaps. And Rickheit is so good a rendering eerie architectural detail that I feel like it's gonna look like I was copying him very badly in my own recent comics attempts.Though I'm not sure that the last act entirely works for me, I think I see how it fits into the greater whole, and acts two and three deliver much of the emotional payoff otherwise denied by the last, I think. So on the whole, this is brilliant, fantastic stuff. Rickheit is one of the best and most original comic constructors out there right now, and I seriously hope that this masterful work, and his new collection via Fantagraphics early next year, can help push him into a level of recognition that will allow him devote more time to these incredible projects.Post-script: I retrospectively docked this one star because while it plays to all of my biases (surrealist horror, architectural insanity, the things between the walls of ordinary life and home, the subconcious (maybe the same thing as the last entry), precision linework, weird sublimated experience), I'm not sure if the narrative development is fully articulated here. Not that it needs to be all obvious or explicit, but I'm not sure the underpinnings are entirely in place, which is more important. Further thought, re-reading needed, obviously. And it's exceptional either way. Nothing short of amazing.In a medium choking on the gray dishwater of middle class white people autobiographies, the Squirrel Machine offers a bright and refreshing gulp of Pure Awesome.This is why graphic novels are important as an artistic medium. A novel can easily represent the breathy whining of a suburban white boy's pain, but it can't even come close to representing what Hans Rickheit has created in this gorgeous Victorian gallery -- part-Dickens, part-Cronenberg, confounding, disgusting, and worth every moment spent.
What do You think about Squirrel Machine, The (2013)?
weird and gross but i also liked it in a way. the artwork is very good.
—Skye
I don't often say this, but that was fucking weird.
—Chelsey
