Josh Pettinger describes the first issue of his Pleasure Beach series simply as “a PTSD fever dream about going home.” That though, and the apparent subtitle of ‘Hot Summer Megadepression’, tell you all you really need to know about this new venture from the San Francisco-based English artist behind Goiter.
Brenda is returning to the small island town of her younger years after making a name for herself as a model. But her arrival, after a calamitous bus journey, is not a welcoming one. Her mother’s house is on the market in anticipation of a controversial bridge being built to connect the island with the mainland, and not everyone is happy to see her back. Meanwhile, a strange conclave of businessmen use a coastal sewage outlet as an access point to a subterranean meeting point where they can bathe in waste and discuss local matters…
Pleasure Beach #1 is an almost deliciously bleak introductory chapter. There are obvious themes of “you can never go home again” and of being an outsider in the environment you grew up in but Pettinger intensifies them with a quiet sense of morbidity (in itself an incredibly odd thing to find myself writing given some of the bluntly transgressive and brutal scenes herein). The banality of smalltown life is strangely, almost contradictorily, emphasised throughout by the bizarre oddballs we meet here; the bus passenger with the permanently bleeding head; old school friend Yessica and the toxic co-dependent relationship she has with her brother; and Mr. Graves and his unpleasant line in personal grooming.
Pettinger’s art places a caricatured, often grotesque, cast against more traditionally realistic backgrounds. It’s a technique that brings the darkness and the disarming qualities of both characters and events very much to the fore, with tight-panelled pages giving us a requisite claustrophobic aura, and occasional bursts into looser page layouts underlining the drama of key sequences. There are lots of questions to be answered here including the reasons for Beryl’s return, her past behaviour in the town, and just what’s going on in the world beyond the sewer pipe. But one of the main objectives of a first instalment is to hook the reader with intriguing plot points we desperately want to see advanced and resolved. Pleasure Beach more than does the trick in that regard in this entrancingly nihilistic opener.
Josh Pettinger (W/A) • Self-published, $13.00
Review by Andy Oliver
