Happy hour: Peter Milligan returns to his most brutal social satire – Danger Room –

The percentage of people who feel unhappy in Western societies is growing dramatically every year because of, or perhaps partly for, the episodes of fake happiness that major trademarks serve in their campaigns, and the so-called perfect lives and smiles we see showcased on our mobile devices every day. . This is a particularly prominent trend in the United States, where only 14% of the population say they feel satisfied when they are free to open up anonymously, even if they have to maintain an artificial smile during office hours or news updates. social networks. Accident has become a kind of 21st century disease that we have learned to hide for fear of retaliation at work and/or in social situations.

Veteran British screenwriter Peter Milligan, a gifted author of the absurdities of modern societies and a PhD in human perversion, He documented this phenomenon during his many trips to the United States; sociological material that was little exploited in the comic book world that served as the basis for the creation of the six-issue mini-series happy hourPublished by Ahoy Comics between November 2020 and April 2021 and now coming to Spain curated planet comics†

In Happy Hour, Milligan envisions a dystopian future in the United States where happiness becomes a state-imposed obligation and deploys violent police forces across the region to punish any attempt to dissent. Citizens are forced to undergo brain surgery that immunizes them against melancholy, suffering, or empathy for other people’s pain and turns them into zombies who walk around with inconsistent smiles on their faces. The unfit are sent to re-education centers and subjected to insane rehabilitation therapies. In one of the centers where the protagonists of this tale meet, Jerry and Kim plan to sneak into the commune run by the grief satrap, Chief Landor Cohen – his features are suspiciously like Sean Penn. a place where they can release all their emotional distress.

We are not dealing here with an Orwellian parable about the nature of authoritarian societies or a Kafkaesque existential drama, since Milligan prefers not to develop his initial thesis any more than is absolutely necessary—in part because the underlying plot frame is a bit. It has plenty of holes to provide directly to the hooligan satire, an area where it has acted like a fish in water since its inception in 2000, almost forty years ago. In this way, violence by state security forces, experimental scientific treatments with human guinea pigs, or different philosophical approaches to happiness are dealt with in an openly caricatured approach, with interesting notes on the rise of populism and the resurgence of Philofascist ideas. some of the first pages gradually thin out until they form the background of a timeless and grotesque journey to America undertaken by Kim and Jerry; A journey filled with bizarre encounters and all kinds of suspense, presented in highly visual episodic sequences that clamor for an adaptation in the format of a television mini-series.

Happy Hour features great moments of dark humor, such as a parody of the Ludovico method in the novel and film A Clockwork Orange, which consists of constantly bombarding rebellious elements of society with pictures of puppies. Snow – Bing Crosby’s White Christmas playing in the background – is a fictional ancient art to knock down your brain’s defenses, or vomit, a fictional ancient art that lets you know if a person is truly happy by checking their vomit for a smiley face. A brazen celebration of life’s bullshit, including expert leeches and old-fashioned nursing home parties, to the tune of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killerand Milligan seeks to make up for this by appealing to the hyper-realistic art of Michael Montenat, as Sean Phillips did at the time in works such as The Scoundrel. Montenat combines horizontal vignettes in a perfect academic rhythm of cinematic logic, rich in arid landscapes, pollution, and human faces in the foreground, revealing the influence of Alex Ross.

Milligan’s wager – surrendering himself to the brunt of impact and banter without merely the ability to cling to an emotional arc to keep the reader’s interest – but turns against him at the climax of issue three. he can’t cancel the impact of the last two episodes, where the swift irony of the first issue has already become pure comedy. The danger is that good jokes are told too often.