Blimey O'Riley: Romo the WolfBoy
For The Comics Journal a read of Ed "Ilya" Hillyer's graphic novel about a mute wild child with great hair and his talkative fantasist friend having adventures of Young Adult self-discovery in a 19th Century circus troupe.
Three decades ago Ilya was just getting into his stride when Deadline magazine was unceremoniously unplugged and tipped into the wood chipper. Not sure anyone would make great claims in hindsight for his original Deadline strip Slack, farty bread-mould flat-share hoohah that felt like it had emerged from cold storage six years after The Young Ones ended. But moving some of the same characters into The End of the Century Club was an evolution, as close to a Los Bros Hernández vibe as the 1995 London rental sector was likely to get, comics venom for the UK's Tory labyrinth.
At one point in Romo The WolfBoy the young and anonymised-by-choice co-protagonist known as Francis X ditches his ratty moth-eaten outfit and dons a flamboyant Sgt. Pepper jacket, which is something a character in The End of the Century Club did too; both of them being in the identity reinvention business. Or in the Young Adult business, as Ilya squarely is. Romo is a thoroughbred YA narrative, two characters on the cusp of new body consciousness and fresh ways of living as the outside world rearranges itself, supernatural undercurrents standing in for social resistance and unpredictable sticky biological mess.
A lot of the art keeps Ilya's rough pencil outlines, our two characters holding their shapes by corralling loose shifting forces; both are works in progress, always a political thing for art to show. Like a few previous Ilya guys they are the Expanding Men and it's almost their day, as Steely Dan almost but didn't say about circus roustabouts in 1890s Shropshire.