SAUSAGE HAND by Andrew Smith

Sausage Hand (Teenage Dinosaur & Sparkplug Comics): Even though I got this book for free from Tim Goodyear at Teenage Dinosaur, I actually don’t think I would have minded the $6 price tag. At 80 pages, it reads less like a mini-comic and more like a sprawling graphic novel. It’s dense and weighty, both physically and thematically. While there are some minor struggles with perspective (notice how the gun barrel is positioned in early panels), Andrew Smith’s book is very attractive aesthetically. The art is a mélange of styles informed by everyone from Robert Crumb and Tony Millionaire to I Will Destroy You’s Tom Neely. One of the books consistent themes is an unspoken link between sex and violence. Notice how the pig aspect-of-self erects his business only when he’s in the process of killing, or how another aspect of self does the same when accosted by the book store clerk. The events are awash in a malleable reality with surreal and skewed perspective shots that bristle with life. Sausage Hand is particularly concerned with external existential quandaries (What is my purpose? Why do I exist?) and internal turmoil with various aspects of self – Freud’s psychic apparatus of the id, ego, and superego – all competing for dominance. Smith also offers up some memorable one-liners, such as the “triune joy” of the modern consumer ethic or “you only discipline someone you care about,” which possess a worldly wisdom beyond their low-fi form. Grade A.