Pacify.

An award-winning movie star with money and fame to burn, Sarcophaga is Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Nicolas Cage (without all of that bug-eyed business) rolled into one. Where others would have only found misery at the suicide of their young mother, he tapped a drive and will to succeed that, when combined with his natural charisma, allowed Sarcophaga to climb to the top of the heap. From tragic beginnings to his mysterious death in the offices of condiment, petroleum, and tobacco magnate Hans Tsondo, the seriocomic adventures of America’s leading-est of leading men are boffo and provide a fascinating look at what makes our culture tick.

Oh, yes. Sarcophaga has a fly’s head. Literally. He’s six feet, two inches of pheromone-dripping, insect-craniumed superstar.

This jarring detail, when dropped into the Chuck Palahniuk-styled biopsy of fame and modern media that is Steven Perkins’s graphic novel Pacify, allows the reader to look at accepted entertainment tropes – the cattle-call for barely talented singers, tabloid obsession over whether or not a Louisiana tart is pregnant again, and two major movie stars having to go to Africa so one of them gets to birth without ten cameras being snuck into the delivery room – as the absurd, meaningless things that they are and get entertained at the same time.

This is where Perkins’s work really succeeds. Rarely a page goes by where a chuckle is not elicited by a bit of black humor, a perfectly awkward pause, or a joke that shouldn’t be funny takes on a new dimension. It’s Adbusters meets early MAD meets Elektra: Assassin. According to the afterward, Perkins spent years shopping Pacify around, doing it in bits and pieces as he could, concurrently developing his technique. While it’s obvious that some pages were created earlier or later in his exploration of the medium, this adds to the metatextual tone that the whole thing carries.

With something like Pacify as his opening salvo, I’m fairly sure that Steven Perkins is going to be able to rattle cages in the future. To see preview pages, click here.