Big City: Living in Oblivion

The Complete Oblivion City Saga - Andy Garcia (SLG, 1995) 

An obscure and criminally overlooked indie press gem by Andy Garcia (not that Andy Garcia) from the early '90s that is packed with zany characters, more ideas than you can shake a stick at, and an extraperimental narrative structure.

The cover to Big City: The Complete Oblivion City Saga TPB (Slave Labor Graphics, 1995)

The Road to Oblivion (City)

Apart from all the esoteric bullshit and swearing associated with this site; the real reason I chose to set up a blog was to write about relatively obscure material such as this. You won't find anything about Oblivion City on Wikipedia, nor will you find anything about its creator, (not that) Andy Garcia. In fact, you can probably count the amount of articles and reviews on the one hand of an ectrodactyle.

The original series of Oblivion City was published by Slave Labor Graphics, and ran for nine issues between 1991 and 1992. I picked up the trade paperback edition at Forbidden Planet around about the time it first came out, three years later. I had never heard of the comic before (or since), but was desperate to try something a bit different. The mid-90s was a bad time for the comics industry, and was really struggling to hold my interest.

After entraining at Tottenham Court Road tube station, I had found myself a seat and proceeded to read through my brand new purchase. I completed the whole book in a single sitting, as the train took me right the way up to High Barnet, all the way down to Morden, and then back up to North London again, before alighting at my required destination. It's suffice to say that I found it a compulsively hypnotic read, and one that has remained strong in the memory for well over a couple of decades.

OK, so the service is crap; don't lose your head over it!

A Creator I Don't Know

Sharing his name with (that) Andy Garcia doesn't exactly make it easy to search for information about this guy, and the fact that he hasn't been particularly prolific doesn't help much either. Apart from a handful of single-issue Oblivion City spin-offs (Awkward Universe, Megazzar Dude, Seth Throb: Underground Artist), and a small number of instantly forgotten one-shots (Frozen Embryo, Sizzle Theatre, Beelzelvis), the feeling is that his best work had very much been achieved in producing the Big City saga. Indeed, the series has such a dense and intensely rich concentration of ideas, that it is easy to assume he had left himself very little else to work with afterwards. It was a bit like watching the final instalment of that dreadful '90s Euro-soap Eldorado, in which they tried to pack six weeks' worth of storyline into a single thirty-minute slot.

The main character is a regular urbanite called Seth who experiments in his relationship with the reader, draws underground comics for a living, and is almost entirely nonchalant to the madness that surrounds him. I think it is safe to presume that there is quite a lot of (not that) Andy Garcia in the character. He spends most of his time observing (which is another dead giveaway), and never really leaves his position as a spectator, even when he is forced to react.

The story itself plays out almost like an amphetamine-laden episode of Cheeky's Week (but without the crap jokes), from the semi-eponymous children's humour comic of the late 1970s; no solid narrative structure as such, but plenty of wild characters, wacky situations, and weird cutaways to enjoy. In addition to its overarching general theme, the diegesis does progress into some form of contrived storytelling towards the latter stages of the book, although the pacing suffers ever so slightly as a result. At this point, it is probably worth remembering that you aren't reading a graphic novel, but a collected series, therefore something like this is surely to be anticipated.

The art style works well in that scratchy, underground kind of approach you would probably expect from a pre-computer era, alternative comic book. There are some inconsistencies in (not that) Andy Garcia's drawing technique, and can't help feeling that perhaps he just hadn't got it entirely nailed down yet. Very nearly, but just not quite (a bit like my writing!). Nonetheless, his artwork is perfectly vivid, highly expressive, and is as visually challenging as his offbeat scripts... which is no mean feat indeed.

I feel your pain, brother!: A masterclass in comic book agony.

The Awkward Universe

I don't think I'd be spoiling anything by going through some of the kind of things you can expect from this comic book (most of it's included in the blurb on the back cover, after all): we have a mayor that commits suicide every Thursday, a local diner that serves acid in its chilli con carne (and houses a doorway to hell, to boot), a two-headed radio host, an epileptic superhero, a dour alien sidekick, a crazy survivalist, old blue men with tits, and much, much more besides...

There is also a superb segment early on in the book that involves one of the characters passing away and replacing Death himself for a couple of weeks, who happens to be overworked and in urgent need of a holiday.

The best way to describe this book is as an inter-dimensional, roller-coaster journey of psycho-grunge, from the mind of a creator, and lover of comics, who has probably achieved his lifetime's ambition in producing this work. The result is a raw overdose of garage humour, with a deep-lying undercurrent of post-reactionary nihilism, that will tingle every comic-reading cell of your brain, and leave you asking, "what the blinking flip?..."

Living in Oblivion

Seeing as the aim of my posts are not only to tantalise, titillate, and torment; but also to record, report and register; I therefore think it is only fitting to transcribe, word to word, the publisher's note from the preface page of this peculiar publication.

"Oblivion: we've all been there at one time or another. Life has a way of making sure we spend at least a little of or time in Purgatory. Oblivion should be familiar to all of us.

Andy Garcia's version of Oblivion is unlike anything else you are likely to see in comics. It's fun, terrifying and something you'll be telling your friends about for a long time. 

Andy Garcia is one of the oddest cartoonists I have ever had the pleasure of publishing, and I consider him to be one of my greatest finds. I hope you'll find this collection of Andy's early work as enjoyable as I did when I first saw it years ago."

- Dan Vado

I wouldn't want to be in Skinny Archie's shoes, whoever the hell he is.

The Bottom Line

You really should read this book; definitely not today, probably not tomorrow, but soon. Someone needs to organise its reprinting, or to get it made available digitally via one of them app thingies. Heed my words. And if you're one of the few people that have actually already read it, then why not drop me a comment?... even if you thought it was shite!

For the record however, each of the only other two people on the internet to have covered this comic had both reported back most favourably. Even the person that runs the online Oxfam store seemed to like it.

I'm getting the feeling that this gimmick isn't catching on at all, and I have the stats to prove it. I still don't really care, but you can nevertheless download the full set of eCards from this post here.

All visual content is for demonstrative purposes only and is the property of the respective owners.