A Barbecue in Happydale

by Gavin Jasper of 4thletter!

I’m going to go a different route this time. Usually I discuss comics that end up being weird. This time I’m going to discuss a comic that’s explicitly about being weird from the get go. The topic today is Happydale: Devils in the Desert, a Vertigo comic from 1999, written by Andrew Dabb and illustrated by the late Seth Fisher.

I actually received this comic as a Secret Santa Christmas gift last year by a reader who thought I’d dig it. He also sent me enough cannon fodder to keep this column going for another three years, but that’s beside the point. I knew I couldn’t put off reading Happydale based on the cover of the first (of two) trade-sized issues.

The amounts of, “What’s that guy’s deal?” alone set a tone that intrigued me.

The best way I can describe Happydale is as the anti-slasher. It takes a tried and true formula for horror movies and reverses it in an original way. You have to look at the formula used for movies like The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, House of Wax, House of a Thousand Corpses and a million others like them. You start off with a group of relatively good-hearted, normal folks – either a family or a group of teenage friends. They travel around and find themselves in a strange town, usually after they had a decent chance to evade it, only to find that the strange locals are a bunch of psychotic weirdos out for blood. The car doesn’t start, there’s no way out and the body count starts to rise. Familiar, right?

Now, let’s take this concept and reverse it. You know those weirdos in the freaky neighborhood? What if they aren’t evil psychos? Let’s say that they’re good, kindly folks. And the normal people who visit and get stranded? They are the ones who are horrible monsters. When the shit hits the fan, how does it splatter this time?

We start off by being introduced to our visitor protagonists in the worst depiction one could ask for. They just laid waste to a gas station in the middle of nowhere, killing everyone in the area. To prove against any suspicions that maybe they were just up against some criminals in a badass gun-fu action sequence, we see that among the victims is an innocent family in a van, in the middle of filling up their tank. Also, we see a pentagram behind the station with a human hand in the middle. So yeah, they’re jerks.

The ringleader is Vincent, a half-black/half-Asian asshole who insists his friends refer to him as Belial at all times. He is, without a doubt, the most evil character in the story. With him is his girlfriend Sadie, who constantly puts up with his abuse and does whatever he tells her to do, and his chunky nerd friend Denny. Denny almost comes across as an innocent in this, dragged along by either his fear of Belial or his desperate need to have friends of any sort. Either way, he’s thoroughly spooked by this experience.

After blowing up what’s left of the gas station, the trio go on their way to Las Vegas. Since Belial doesn’t trust the other two’s driving skills, he demands that they stop at the closest town for the night. Naturally, the closest town is Happydale.

Our first introduction to the town is through H.R., a deputy taking a target shooting test. He does awful, but he’s passed anyway. After all, Happydale isn’t known for criminal activity, so why split hairs? Later when the tester is long gone, H.R. shows that in reality, he isn’t all that bad with a gun after all.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really foreshadow anything about his gunplay. That’s my complaint about Happydale. It feels like Dabb and Fisher were hoping to make a series of stories taking place in this town, but it just didn’t take off. So while the stories of Belial, Sadie and Denny each reach their own conclusion, there is no real closure to any of the town’s citizens. You feel like there should be more to them, but there’s no follow-up.

The town itself is peaceful, but overly strange. As it turns out, it was created as a haven for the outcasts of society. Everyone who is an oddity and can’t fit in can just move to Happydale and feel accepted. This splits the citizens into two groups, ultimately: the mentally strange and the physically strange. There’s Stretch, a guy who appears to be a formerly obese man who lost a ton of weight and now has ugly flaps of skin hanging off his face. On the other side of things is Dino, an unshaven man who seems relatively normal, except for the fact that he’s always wearing a dinosaur costume for no explained reason.

The mayor of the town is a midget with a muscle disease much like Stephen Hawking. The sheriff is an irritated black man with “KKK” scarred into his forehead, so he has no choice but to live in this town. A shopkeeper, a middle-aged woman, has an undying dedication to a long-dead comic book writer that lived in Happydale and treats him the way many treat Jesus. Two of the residents, a man with no legs and a man with no arms, work together in the business of writing advertising jingles. Then there is Paradox Man, a guy wearing a makeshift superhero outfit who refuses to smoke cigarettes because it’s against Justice League regulations. The list goes on and on.

A local woman, Mrs. Merryweather, has a room for rent and our murderous trio stay there. Things go sour that night as at a bar, a waitress accidentally spills a drink on Belial. He insults her to the point that her martial arts expert brother steps in and physically forces Belial into an apology. This leads to Belial later running him off the road and getting revenge by beating him to death with a baseball bat.

They play it cool and try to leave the next day, only to discover that their sparkplugs have been stolen. It isn’t because anyone’s on to them, but because one of the residents apparently steals them regularly to help build a rocket ship. Belial goes to buy some, but the shop is seemingly out. What neither Belial nor the shopkeeper realize is that a big box of sparkplugs and a sign pointing out that they’re on sale are far above them on the top shelf. The shopkeeper’s overgrown son Isaac, who appears to be in some way mentally challenged, seems to have placed the sparkplugs there, not realizing that nobody but he can see that high. It’s a subtle joke that took me a second reading to get, but I like it.

Eventually, the three are found out for their misdeeds and find themselves hiding in Mrs. Merryweather’s house, with the Merryweather family as their hostages. That’s how the first issue ends.

The second issue spends more time getting to know our characters. We see that Belial is actually rich and well off, but can’t deal with that, so he tries to be a too-cool-for-school devil worshipper. Sadie finds out she’s pregnant for the umpteenth time, but this time figures she may have her baby for once, despite what Belial tells her. Denny, as we discover, is not only a heroin junky, but is an alleged rapist. Whether he really did it or whether the girl claimed he did it after the fact is left for interpretation. Either way, Denny finds himself unable to say no to anything Belial tells him to do and hates himself for it.

We also get more personable with the townspeople, seeing them hang out and socialize with each other. As strange as they seem, underneath that veil, they all come off as pretty normal people. Well, most of them at least.

A pair of Happydale residents are revealed to be shady businessmen with intent to financially capitalize on the chaos created by Belial and his friends. In the end, they show a touching sense of mercy.

Melinda, the teenage daughter of Mrs. Merryweather, appears normal enough in the beginning. She despises the rest of the town and relates with Belial over it. Yet as we later see, she’s just as fucked up as anyone else within the town’s borders. More on the mental side, if you’re wondering.

I guess that’s what it’s all about in the end. Everybody is pretty weird, but even the most fucked up person is relatable in some sense.

I won’t go into how the story concludes, but I do want to talk about Paradox Man for a second.

Based on this exchange, I can’t help but think that underneath that mask, Paradox Man is Belial. Why? Because it just wouldn’t make sense. As wacky as everything is in Happydale, there’s nothing outright supernatural about it. But having Paradox Man be Belial despite the two having no similarities in personality, being shown in the same panel a couple times and a variety of other reasons I won’t go into? It’s his name! Plus his actions cause a series of events that lead to the conclusion of the story. It’s so Twilight Zone that I have a hard time convincing myself otherwise.

Happydale: Devils in the Desert isn’t going to change your life, but it’s still a nice gem. It’s filled with personality and a never-ending supply of interesting characters. It’s a shame that we’ll never get a follow-up with Fisher gone, but maybe we should get him a park statue like the shopkeeper lady in this book. Come, let’s all pray to Seth Fisher!