TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS

A being with no shell , open to pain

Tormented by light , shaken by every sound

- RILKE

A Maggot's Tale is part of a self-conscious attemp on the part of writers and artists as diverse as Art Spiegleman (Maus) , Chester Brown (Yummy Fur) and the Hernandez Bros. (Love and Rockets) to infect the sterile and arid deserts of American comics with the dissonance and violence of the avant-garde .

In a world populated by steroid popping , cod-piece wearing Image wank-fests and X-men inspired exploitations of spunk dribbling fanboys these comics are a necessary breath of insurrection and art (a foreign concept inside these hallowed halls) . Even if the attempts are usually somewhat clumsy and often misguided (a beaver shot does not a Picasso make) then this is balanced out by what is at stake in this battlefield .

What unites the diverse attempts at providing an alternative to the mainstream is the realization that if comics want to survive as a valid form of artistic expression in the late 20th century , it can no longer be limited to superhero fantasies and the sterile pornography of muscles and musculinity . These stories are the providence of pre-pubescent fantasies and nostalgia . If something new must be said new ways to say it must be discovered . Lacking its own language of non-mainstream expression the best comic art of the last decade has done this through immersion in the world of art outside the (ever decreasing) field of wortwhile comic products .

In A Maggot's Tale Rogers & Matson combine the tragic solipsism of Beckett with a translation of Freud's postulations concerning the mind of the narrator - the castle of his skull containing the drone of the narrative . The outside world is stripped away , deregulated to one censored panel of a closet . The mind becomes the borderline of an eternal conflict : the insistent destruction of innocence and sexuality enforced by the Oedipal gestapo .

The Id (which Matson seperates from the Ego through a simple change in backgroung coloring) is the site of warfare and punishment ; ritual humiliation by the forces of God and the father which strips away the last vestiges of innocence . The Ego , a single disfigured face , remains oblivious to this conflict . He is wrapped up in his own private despair . The stripping away of the world , its reduction to the mind , forces him into awareness of his own fictional nature as a picture in a comic book ; eternally exposed to the look of his readers.

In a Shakespearean monologue he acts as a victim confronting his voyeur ; preferring his own disappearance to the continual gaze of the reader . In the end the comic becomes a search for silence : the Ego no longer wants to speak if it means that he receives attention from the reader , thereby exposing his fictional status ; the Id is silenced , muted through experience and repression . What drives the narrative is a desire for silence , erasure , death .

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