Peepland

Written by Christa Faust and Gary Phillips
Art by Andrea Cameron (male)
Colors by Marco Lesko
Lettering by Jimmy Betancourt

Buy it HERE.

The bad old days.

The seedy, dark underbelly of a city in decay and a decade in decline is what is depicted so sharply in Peepland. Clocking in at 120 pages the look and tone Christa Gary and Andrea (male) lay down here, with colors by Lesko keep it grimy, in a perpetual churn.

'Just say no.'

Long ago the area in New York City known as Times Square was the epicenter of sexual pleasure and drug usage, stuff kept out of other burgs. Contrasting sharply was the 'say no to drugs' mantra espoused by our First Lady Nancy Reagan, and a general 'us vs. them' wealth and privilege outpacing meager existence.

Everywhere in Peepland this is made known from the attitude of the street hustlers to the out of touch existence of the higher up elites. One such elite, the son of a Billionaire Real Estate Scion (sound familiar?) named Robert Went is caught on tape strangling a woman to death. The existence of that tape is in the hands of a lower level porn star who goes by the name Dirty Dick. He stashes the tape in a peepshow boutique for safe keeping but gets pushed into an oncoming subway train by men working for the billionaire. The tape lands in the lap of our heroine of the story, Roxy Bell, who works the peepshow booths doing what her customers want to see her do for money behind a solid glass wall.

Along with Roxy are her friends, a coworker at the Peepshow Aiesha, Roxy's boyfriend Nick who is mohawked and plays in a punk band (mohawk gets a pass here). Aiesha has a butch smaller red head girlfriend and a son Lorenzo who gets blamed for the murder -that is, until the tape is found.

Class war.

What sounds like a lot of plot twists and characters is actually a very smoothly told story to read. A lot goes on in Peepland but it doesn't get confusing. One senses the despair, dirtiness and hopelessness of the Reagan era that spun this fairy tale of wealth somehow being readily available for all. Faust and Phillips make it clear that there's only low level to mid level prosperity in store for the underclasses, and that the ultra rich stay on another plane, unspoiled by such grubbiness. The only way to break out of the faceless sea of 'the unwashed' is to commit acts of violence, people get robbed, informers get snuffed, those holding the incriminating tape meet an untimely end.

Story's on focus.

Peepland gets kudos for staying in that world of despair. It also gets the feeling right of New York resembling an empty shell, movie theaters with obscure low budget horror flicks on the marquee or 'for rent' on the other one. It misses just a little bit (and this is from an old man like me) for the sense of shock that punk rock exuded in the face of normalcy when it first surfaced: this sense of going back to a primitive tribal look and extremism.

Next Tuesday:

Underwater Pirate battles of Broken Trident
by David Steinborn and Travis Bowen