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For The Comics Journal a review of Project MK-Ultra: Sex, Drugs and the CIA Volume 1, a book on my radar ever since its creator Stewart K. Moore drew a Defoe story in 2000AD and unleashed some of the most idiosyncratic art that the comic has run in years.
Readers of Erik Davis’s book High Weirdness can nod wisely when bits and pieces of the early 1970s now bubble up in our current cultural moment, which is happening all over the place, but Moore’s approach to the CIA’s adventures in mind control and various related smoking craters does raise the issue of how exactly you might draw that era for a comic. It’s not quite fair to say his answer is to throw the artistic kitchen sink at it—the Defoe story suggested that Moore keeps a stock of sinks to hand—but the book has some vaulting visual ambition before anything related to the story gets involved, and the energy of the layouts and figure work is unrelenting.
And unrelentingly cartoony. Conspiracy comics don’t all have to look like the Bill Sienkiewicz section of Brought to Light—cut-up fragments and jagged ink strokes and portraiture and photo-montage and a general air of mild modernism, pages that might be glued to the wall of a radical cell—although that kind of agitprop is the familiar form. But not, it seems, for SK Moore, who draws political conspiracy somewhere between Mad magazine and Guy Peellaert, a thoroughly physical as well as mental process, not an uneasy feeling but your actual shitshow. The walking moral vacuums on the Government payroll busily putting LSD into each other’s tea for a laugh are cartooned and lampooned in ways which leave their menace and its implications fully intact, the Keystone Cops apparently given the keys to the Parallax Test.
The Bill Sienkiewicz version: your tax dollars spent by villains
The SK Moore version: your tax dollars spent by clowns
