My old buddy/Hang Dai Editions partner/former Keyhole co-conspirator Dean Haspiel has just released Fear My Dear: A Billy Dogma Experience (Z2 Comics) and you must buy it! Completely remastered from the webcomic that ran online on ACT-I-VATE, it’s a gorgeous square-bound objet d’art. Dino asked me to write the book’s introduction, and I was honored to oblige: see how many phrases I copped directly from Billy, Jane, et al…
Friends, folks, and jackasses:
You are in for a treat: Dean Haspiel at the height of his powers. It’s all here: Dino’s spectacular storytelling, his gorgeous, stylish brushstrokes—and his iconic creation Billy Dogma in a way we’ve never seen him before: rebooted, stripped-down to his purest essence.
The original Billy was a philosopher for the 1990s, sounding off in his own unique way about the vagaries of fame, neighborliness, and the functional necessity of women’s hips. There’s a great moment in Fear My Dear when Billy pauses in the midst of furious action. He pauses, and he… thinks! Before he acts! It’s a first for the character, and it sparks a metamorphosis: the square-jawed philosopher transforms into a scruffy desert prophet. Billy Dogma 2.0 is all about the heart—and the hard lesson that “you don’t get to love when you love like you love.”
The primary object of Billy’s love, of course, is the spectacularly bespectacled Jane Legit. And In “Immortal,” the red-soaked opening story, Billy and Jane’s “war of woo” is played out—disastrously—on the mean streets of Trip City. (Billy and Jane are reality stars without the mediating authority of television.) And all the inhabitants of Trip City, from the beat cops to the regulars over at Lucy’s Bar, tell the tale. One of the great pleasures of all Billy Dogma stories is the language. Billy has always had the gift of gab—Jane too—and here we discover that apparently everyone in Trip City talks in the same lingo: part hard-boiled slang, part beat poetry. Thus we learn about “indulging a ruse,” “a lonely monster sans purpose,” and “steeping in seasons of cosmic love.” Sometimes your only option is to laugh and scratch your head at Dino’s unfathomable brilliance, but there’s no doubt it rings a cryptic coda.
From “Immortal” we segue into the golden-accented tones of the title story, as Billy embarks on a vision quest to (literally) get his head on straight. I won’t spoil the details of his heroic journey, but what emerges is Billy’s “secret origin:” Who is he? Where does he come from? What’s the deal with that Berserk Gun? Bite the bullet and take the bait—all shall be revealed.
Hopefully, your eyes are sensitive to feelings, because Fear My Dear is beautiful, funny, and guaranteed to make you go, “Awww”! I love Dino’s Billy Dogma tales precisely because they’re so completely different from my own work—fantastic, imagistic, and preoccupied by the BIG QUESTIONS. And after reading Fear My Dear, I bet you’ll love them too.
Fear My Dear is Dino’s most ambitious work to date. Harder than the hardest heart attack, it will spark the napalm in your apocalypse. So, sally forth, reader—it’s as easy as hopscotch!