Pixy

You think you’ve got troubles? Meet Alka Seltzer and Angina Pectoris. First, their safe-sex suits malfunction just before they’re put out on the street because their apartment building is being put to death. Later, their aborted fetus (remember those safe-sex suits) makes harassing phone calls to them from the kingdom of the dead. So Alka heads for the netherworld, where time runs backward and is bought and sold as a commodity, to track down Pixy (the fetus) and kill him for good. Instead, Alka and Pixy become buddies and return to the land of the living to wreak havoc. In his first major work, Swedish cartoonist Andersson creates a disturbing universe in which people shed bodies and take on new ones with casual frequency, money is bred on farms, hungry houses eat their inhabitants, and wisdom is found on milk cartons. In its graphic and narrative approaches, Andersson’s work has been compared to that of alternative-comics artists Chester Brown (Yummy Fur) and Julie Doucet (Dirty Plotte); a noncomics parallel would be Eraserhead, drawn by George Grosz. Andersson, however, is a genuine original, and Pixy should make adult-comics readers eager to follow his career. Gordon Flagg