Come Again, You Resurrection Perverts

If you’re watching the David Lynch-driven revival of Twin Peaks these days, you’re grooving, as the hippies used to say, on some iconic, creepy, and increasingly mystical shit.

That’s a good thing, to be sure – even if, as Matt Zoller Seitz presciently noted, it turns out to be ultimately incomprehensible.

But now here’s this other new thing – not a revival, but a totally new new thing – by Danny Hellman, and it’s also iconic and creepy and increasingly mystical.

This is Resurrection Perverts: Hunter’s Point, and it’s the first book in a graphic-novel series by the acclaimed illustrator, and it’s made to blow your mind.

It’s made to blow your mind, I suggest, because some mind-blowing shit happens near the end of the book (and who knows what wonders or horrors will be revealed next?) … but, really, any mind-blowing will succeed, here or elsewhere, partly because what leads up to it is so firmly anchored in reality.

In the case of Resurrection Perverts, it’s a reality in which a struggling porn-magazine magnate has gotten hold of, and is planning to publish, some photos of the POTUS caught in a compromising position (read: fucking someone he shouldn’t be), yes; but it’s a reality so well captured in Hellman’s full-page panels, from multiple perspectives, with dialogue and dynamics that are what actual everyday humans generate and experience, that, when the weirdness comes in, it’s a definite WTF? sequence.

Is the weirdness spurred, in part, by the actions of a serial killer of B-list celebrities? Yes, it is.

Is the weirdness presented with the careful draftsmanship (and glossy, full-color splendor) of the more quotidian preamble? Yes, it is.

So, what will become of Harry Homburg of Harlot Magazine – and what will become of his dysfunctional family and business associates, sleazy or otherwise – after he crosses paths with “The Rx Killer” in a lounge downtown? And what of those incriminating Presidential photos that the media’s buzzing about? And what’s with … I mean, look, what’s with that lotus flower floating in a bowl of water, Danny Hellman?

We’ll thank you for this initial salvo against our sense of sanity and decency, sure, because it’s a good and powerful one, and so impressively designed in this hardcover edition. But you really need to hurry up and let us see what the hell happens next.