Max Cannon's Red Meat

Drawn in black-and-white, using a 1940s-like appearance, Cannon's cast inhabits a suburb, but seemingly not one of this day and age. In some of the earlier strips, a recurring character was Bug-Eyed Earl, an aptly named redneck sort with a proclivity for oddball tales. The very first strip (on the website, at least) is entitled "The Unlightable Bareness of Meat"; if that doesn't bring an instantaneous laugh, it's a play-on-words, stealing from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

In this particular episode, Earl laments the fact that he has just been fired from a job, saying, "They thought my personality was weird." One might be inclined to feel sympathy for a character expressing such a predicament; however, if you look two frames over, Earl follows it with: "That's okay, I have four more." With that, a reader has had his first induction into the alternate universe of Max Cannon. It is a place where artificially intelligent robots torment human beings, old cowpokes have psychedelic flashbacks, and pets seem to meet untimely demises as often as Mr. Bill.

Cannon was born in Tucson, Arizona; Red Meat first appeared in the Arizona Daily Wildcat (that being the University of Arizona's student newspaper) in 1989. It reached its current notoriety after appearing in the Madison University newspaper The Onion, known for such eye-catching headlines as "Home Depot Honors Fallen Soldier By Giving His Mom Free Power Drill," or "NYPD Apologizes For Accidental Shooting-Clubbing-Stabbing-Firebombing Death." In case you haven't figured it out, all of The Onion's news stories are utterly fallacious (and proud of it.) Appropriately, Red Meat falls along those lines as well.

One of the more frequently seen characters is Ted Johnson, a suburban Dad with a wife, child, and uncanny knack for getting himself into inescapable trouble. He, like many of his supporting characters, has a classic "All-American" ambience to him. His dialogue, however, suggests otherwise. Observe...Ted and his son are spending some quality time camping, and it begins to rain. So far, so ordinary...until Johnson informs his son that it's not rain, "it's bat urine. These night skies are teeming with millions of bats." This would be bad enough, but in the third panel, Ted "comforts" his son by telling him, "They won't fly down here...those bats are just as afraid of the giant mulch ticks and pine leeches as we are."

Max Cannon's Myspace page, which some might expect to reveal a little of the man behind the mask, will probably disappoint many. Cannon's headline reads, "Go on...look in the box. Don't worry, it's not the head of anyone you know." Under "Movies," he writes, "Bring 'em on. Good, bad, bizarre, unintelligible...it doesn't matter." From a description such as this, one might expect to find films such as David Lynch's Eraserhead or even Frank Zappa's 200 Motels in Cannon's film library. In fact, Lynch, similarly, is very secretive, and doesn't seek the fame and attention normally attributed to celebrities.

Cannon might be seen as one of those "artists on the fringe," like Salvador Dalí, Allen Ginsberg, and Luis Buñuel. Their genius lies partly in the fact that only they might truly understand what they have wrought. It is commonly thought that to be a truly brilliant artist, one has to be at least moderately insane. Though Cannon might not fit the clinical defintion of "mental illness," he possesses the sort of dementia necessary to create art that is inaccessible to a mainstream audience. Can you picture a Red Meat strip sitting comfortably next to Peanuts, Doonesbury, or Zits? It's likely that most people wouldn't; yet, just as Lord of the Rings and Björk have their cult following, so does Max Cannon.

Odd as it may seem, the strip's out-of-place situations often make one think. People in America, particularly in the suburbs, may scurry through life so quickly as to forget the plethora of things around them. Red Meat places a microscope over the lives of those near-invisible folks we often forget about: the milkman, the mailman, the deformed neighbor, and the...glowing skull of mystery? Alright, hopefully no one sees that last one.

For all you quirky, left-of-center, off-the-beaten-path types, Red Meat just might be the comic strip you've been searching for. Pick up a copy; Bug-Eyed Earl will appreciate it.