In his intro, creator Dave worries about the personal nature of issue 4, which he fears may be seen as self indulgent, before defending it because he's pleased with it aesthetically. I assume a couple of melancholic cartoons about a recent breakup are what's meant here, though by the standards of Mighty Joe Matt, there's no self-revelation that should raise a blush. Nor is there, at first glance, anything to shout about graphically. However what appears to be a rather roughly drawn, hasty zine, turns out on closer reading to be something more sophisticated, dreamy and poetic, with images and symbols running through different stories like a river.
A prelude shows scenes of a diseased city, swollen with bureaucracy, where time passes without meaning. Thoughts Walking Home follows, a meditation on reading Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her collection of essays about sixties counterculture, while Dave is feverish in a squat and, at one point, interrupted by a police visit. The story eventually whites out into a desert sun on a horizon - Didion's California, but also an icon repeated elsewhere through the zine including the cover. Turning the page, the sun becomes the uppermost bubble in a thought balloon of a tiny figure slouching home through a rainy cityscape. Panel transitions like this, from blazing desert heat to downpour, are why Dave should keep making comics.
The desert sun appears again in The Adventures of Johnny and Doodlebug where panel one informs us Doodlebug has abandoned his own strip in disgust at its pretension - leaving Johnny to mercilessly rip into the rest of his creator's efforts. Another strip starts with a panel of a setting sun then pulls back to show Dave drawing it, wondering about it for a few panels before abandoning the strip. Yet there's something mesmerising about a strip in which you the reader watch an artist watching what he's drawing.
As well as the comics, there are some random bits and pieces including a very funny description of a self harming German performance artist, bread making tips, and some excellent Great Moments in History. My final mental image of Dave is of a slightly damaged idealist wearing a Nietzsche T-shirt and a gentle smile. Extricate #4 is an atmospheric zine that rewards closer attention than its appearance might at first seem to merit.
Heather Middleton