Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017

I should have realized they were commercial illustrators – their work has all of the hallmarks. The polish, the construction, the architecture of the comics panels. It all shows a deep insight into design and a deep concern for design, for telling stories precisely and sharply.

Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017 collects the first twenty years of short comics work by siblings Maria Hoey and Peter Hoey. The siblings live on opposite ends of the American continent and work together, writing and drawing on the same digital pages somewhat simultaneously. Some pieces were co-written by Charles Paul Freund, and the song lyrics in particular seem to be mostly from Freund.

The book is structured in a reverse order, starting with issue five of Coin-Op, which the Hoeys self-publish. Before that are the earlier stories from Blab! The stories are presented in a quirky, non-chronological order for a particular reading experience.

The Hoeys are successful illustrators who also make comics. As Monte Beauchamp, who “discovered” the Hoeys for comics as editor of Blab! in the ’90s, points out in a text appreciation in the book, comics are vastly less remunerative than illustration. He does a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of just how much money the Hoeys could have made with the same number of pictures for commercial clients.

The work has all of the hallmarks of commercial illustration: the polish, the construction, the architecture of the comics panels. It all shows a deep insight into design and a deep concern for telling stories precisely and sharply.

Some of the stories are straightforward narratives, but many are more dreamlike, or design-driven. There’s a series of illustrated “articles” about jazz musicians – all of them, I think, entirely fictional – and some pieces that seem to be mostly song lyrics (original, I think) turned into visual art. There’s another series about two sad-sack characters, anthropomorphic dogs or dog-headed men, named Saltz and Pepz who get into various scrapes during what seems to be the Great Depression. The Hoeys also have a few stories in a twelve-panel grid, showing the same wide scene each page, as big events crash or break across multiple panels and characters.

Many of the stories are set in the vague past, what I think of as the ’30s or the ’50s – not during The War, not during anything major or notable – with boxy cars and people in constructed suits and all the furniture of a world that’s familiar and stable and entirely gone.

Even the pieces I call straightforward are very Hoey-esque: designed, often to the point of being schematic, telling stories as much in the ways the panels are laid out on the page as in the things that happen in those panels. None of it is obvious; none of their work is ever obvious, I’m coming to believe.

There’s a lot of depth and interest in Coin-Op: a lot of time and thought went into every panel here. Even the wordless, imagistic stories – which, as a Word Person, I had to admit I didn’t really “get” – are full of wonders and surprises. The Hoeys are as interested in how they tell stories, how they present moments visually, how those visually feel, as they are in the story being told.

They’re illustrators. It’s what they do. And they do it really well.

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