Art: Painting and Drawing: Greg Hisle
It's the mid-1970s, Richmond, KY. A young boy named Greg Hisle moves to Governor's Manor Apartments on Meadowlark drive and becomes friends with another young tenant, Jeffrey Scott Holland. Together, they embark on an ambitious series of homemade comic books (mostly done while lounging around sipping lemonade on Greg's back porch, or while watching old Popeye cartoons on Channel 19).
Recently a large trove of these comics, assumed to have been lost forever, were unearthed in the Holland family garage. Holland's childhood works are planned to be released in an online exhibit at Louisville's Deatrick Gallery eventually, and we here at the KTF wanted to get some of Hisle's childhood art out there as well. Shown here are some of the very few intact comics of Hisle's that still exist. Most of the Hisle pieces in the collection are mini-posters establishing and promoting each of his characters.
Hisle and Holland were both precocious kids who were gifted with exceptional art skills (they were between ages 8 and 11 when these comics were done), and they were both nerds and outcasts by choice, as a matter of philosophical principle. While Holland's comics leaned more towards the basic horror, sci-fi, and monster genres, Hisle's tastes were very femininely oriented: super-heroines, girl detectives, witches, goddesses, etc.
Unfortunately, the story has an unhappy ending. The two fell out of touch with each other after Holland moved to Atlanta in 1984, after high school. What we know of Greg's life after this point is sketchy and pieced together from several sources. Apparently, after a period of having to care for his mother (who suffered from anxiety attacks and agoraphobia) in Richmond, Greg moved to the west coast, eager to start a new life.
In 2001, in a gay bar called The Loft, two men - Thomas Mayta and Peter Blasik - got into a fight. Mayta reportedly pulled a gun, and in the struggle, it went off and accidentally shot Greg, who was merely an innocent bystander in the club, a victim of someone else's idiotic drama. Greg did not survive the wounds. The event was the subject of an episode of Dick Wolf's television show "Crime & Punishment", but even this brief moment of fame was sullied by having his name spelled incorrectly.
Today he is buried in a small cemetery in the Waco/College Hill area, with no marker on his grave. All that remains on Earth to show that Greg Hisle existed (aside from a few photographs and a rumored videotape of him singing onstage in a Madison Central musical production) are these scant few comics and drawings. Practically nothing is known about his life after the move to San Diego. Kim Cremeans (formerly Kim Agee), a longtime friend of the Hisle family, put it thusly: "What saddens us the most is what we don't know. Did Greg love, and was he loved in return?"
Greg Hisle
