Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Halcyon, by Ron Regé Jr has several titles. The full title is Halcyon Hermenautics AKA The New Cartoon Utopia and a third title is The Shell Of The Self Of The Senses. These three linked titles derive from the way the content evolved over ten issues of a black and white self-published zine called The New Cartoon Utopia, building on themes from Regé Jr’s 2012 book The Cartoon Utopia plus elements drawn from his earlier 2000 book Skibber Bee~Bye. This 112 page volume presents the next stage in his stylistically unique explorations of spirituality in expansive colour artwork bound in a generously-sized 254 x 300mm hardcover.
It opens with celestial creatures–humanoid, asexual, with long hair, pointy ears and large wings–flying through a skyscape of ecstatically shifting swirls and lights radiating outwards from glowing orbs, some of the lines annotated with descriptions of their function: gravity, light, time, waves, particles. A caption beneath the first page of this story says “Repeat infinitely. You were never born and you will never die.” The movement turns anarchic as the faces of these creatures change from blissful to demonic and they tumble from their realm into the air above a farmer tilling the soil. The farmer and child are shocked by this vision but the creatures erase their memories and return to their other-dimensional existence to continue shifting between harmony and chaotic instability.
That’s just the beginning of this New Cartoon Utopia, which on one level is about the spiritual awakening of a boy living in a rural idyll and a girl living in a high-tech, super-future city raised high above the ground, who meet each other and flee to the wilderness together to escape society’s restrictions. Regé Jr’s take on the ultravirtual futureworld of automated assistants and online surveillance, tracking the girl’s every movement and fulfilling her every need (for a price) is a beautiful and funny riff on the problems that misuse of technology poses for us right now. It feels like E. M Forster’s classic 1909 SF tale The Machine Stops mixed with some 1950s Superman stories about his destroyed homeworld, Krypton.
If you’ve read Regé Jr’s previous books mentioned above (or recommended below), themes and imagery seen here will be familiar, as will the appearance of the two protagonists, drawn in his now customary elfin, doll-like style. Naturally there are trials for the two to undergo and a kind of circularity to what happens to them, and a lot of piecing together for the reader to do from the trippy illuminations that swirl through the last third of this book. If you want to pin down what you have been reading to something definitive, you might get some help from the final page which quotes writings from the Nag Hammadi, but your conclusions will be entirely yours since Regé Jr himself often doesn’t know what his message might be. You could just enjoy your time spent visiting between different vibrational dimensions and leave it at that.
