NOWHERESVILLE

A noir crime story and a beatnik/hipster ramble should work together like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, since they're both native to the 1950s—at least that's what appears to be the idea behind Ricketts's Nowheresville comics series, collected here. Unfortunately, both genres are riddled with clichés, nearly every one of which this book succumbs to, and Ricketts's expository dialogue—delivered in mock-hipster slang ("make no mistake—the man is blissed out on a Zen kick")—eventually becomes unintentionally hilarious. There's not much to the plot: angel-headed half-Japanese hipster Chic Mooney wanders through a '50s urban underworld populated by bebop drummers, babes with guns, tough cops and mysterious corpses. Ricketts's b&w art is fabulously stylized and appropriate for the setting, with enormous swatches of black everywhere and the crazy, hard angles of circa-1959 design. He can draw a bombshell in a sweater, a silhouetted bridge or a sleazy cocktail lounge like nobody's business. But his narrative twists its chronology into knots, which should be intriguing but is merely confusing. It doesn't help that the ending makes almost no sense, and that several crucial scenes are obscured by art that doesn't communicate what's going on. It's a period piece, stylish but as empty as an abandoned diner. (June)