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What would you do if God told you to open the door? A review of Zak Sally's SAMMY THE MOUSE


Sometimes comics are just weird, twisted views of reality.  And when that reality starts out as Disney cartoons, the comics just become that much more disturbing.  Zak Sally’s Sammy the Mouse Book 1 starts out looking like one of the old funny-animal comics as a mouse Sammy sits at a table, staring at a doll when there’s a knock on the door.  But Sally immediately shows you that something else is happening here as a voice from somewhere tells Sammy to open the door.  Omniscient narrator?  God?  Sally himself trying to direct the character? From the moment that the voice tells Sammy that he should open the door, Sally takes us on a dizzying trip through Sammy's life that is often amusing but just as disorienting for us as it is for Sammy himself.

Sammy the Mouse Book 1 is some absurdist dream, filled with characters who look like they've stepped off of the set of some children's cartoon and now are going to spend their free time getting drunk and cursing at everything.  It's those cartoons gone horribly wrong and reflecting more than the sweetness and niceness of the world. Sammy is our hero, our Everyman and maybe even ourselves, trapped in a life that he has little control over.  Wanting to spend his day alone in his house, Sammy is forced by the voice to open the door for Feekes, a drunken, foul mouthed duck who wears a stove pipe hat. Feekes drags Sammy to buy more gin and the find Puppy Boy lying in front of a store's cooler. 


None of this, starting at opening the door, is anything that Sammy wanted to do with his time.  The book, a self-printed collection of three issues that are really just 1/3rd of Sally’s planned story, is all about Sammy getting pulled and pushed into a bunch of situations when all he really wants to do is sit at home and do nothing.  Sammy wants to be inactive but Sally, the “voice of God” or maybe it’s just Feekes wants to pull him into a world of uncertainty and pain.  It most definitely wants to pull him to the Baby Bar (yes, a bar that looks like a giant baby doll) and dull the world with alcohol.

While showing us the “wacky” misadventures of Sammy and his friends, Sally is playing out his story on multiple levels, including one that may honestly and truly be the our “reality.”  Just as the voice from above prompts Sammy to open his door or coerces him into cleaning his bathroom, the giant hand from above comes from out of the clouds and transports Sammy back to his living room.  An authorial or narrative force, this voice and finger push Sammy in directions he needs to go.  It’s like Sammy is trying to defy his fate or his author but he just is not strong enough to defy the universe around him.

But there are a couple of “universes” at play in this book.  If it’s not puzzling enough to have a voice of “god” and a hand of “god” show up (same “god?” Different “gods?”) there is the mystery Sally puts into the book of these quick panels that seem to be our “reality” and another voice, but different than any of the other voices we’ve heard,” asking “... is anyone home?”  and “why are the lights off?”  These brief, fleeting glimpses into a different world than Sammy’s  constitute a “what the f**k” moment but also hint at something larger than the simple idea that Sally is just riffing on old cartoon characters.

Through the absurdity and the aimlessness (Sammy’s life, not the story) of Sammy The Mouse Book 1,  Sally gives his characters a life on the page that is planned and yet spontaneous.  The way he pushes the characters around and the way that they react to it creates the tension between what they want to do and what they end up doing anyway.  On a comic page where we can accept that a giant hand can come out of the clouds to push a character back to his living room floor where he needs to be for the next thing to happen, Sally delivers a puzzling book that that feels more real than most comics.  The way that Sammy is pushed around by forces outside of his control is the same way that you’re pushed through this book by Zak Sally.  He’s the voice that’s telling you that he thinks it’s a good idea for you to turn the next page and see what happens next.