Horror Hospital Unplugged: A Graphic Novel

Beautifully adapted into comics form from a Cooper short story, Horror Hospital Unplugged chronicles the sudden rise to the precipice of fame (and the equally abrupt fall) of a young L.A. rock band and the funny, profane and touching sexual journey of Trevor Machine, the band's handsome, self-destructive, gay lead singer, the kind of disaffected young hero characteristic of so much of Cooper's fiction. But Cooper's themes have been wholly transformed by the brilliantly inventive, psychologically obsessive, black-and-white drawings of Mayerson, in an hallucinatory graphic style that is at once expressive, whimsical and representational, with stylish elements ingeniously grafted from fine artists like Redon and cartoonists like Sempe and Arnold Roth; as well as from Japanese manga and American comics. Cooper and Mayerson have produced an hilarious satire of the record business (and a vicious sendup of David Geffen and his celebrity coterie) that is also an idiosyncratic (albeit somewhat melodramatic) queer love story that graphically details the ever-present social white noise of sexual desire, the frustration and possibilities of love, and the sudden calamity of loss. (Oct.)