I'd heard about Hicksville while reading another graphic novel, and I'm glad I did because this is one of the best I've read. It's an homage to comics, a glimpse into the life of a strange New Zealand town, and a parable of sorts about the ills of ill-gotten gains. It also tells a great story with a bunch of interesting characters, and in the end that's kind of the point of these book things.

The story begins with a comics journalist making his way to a small town called Hicksville, the birthplace of one of the world's biggest comics writers. In Horrocks vision, popular comics writers share the esteem and celebrity of any triple A movie star or musician. The writer in question, the wonderfully named Dick Burger, is a super-star with movie deals and TV spin-offs and the kind of lifestyle you'd expect to see on a VH1 special (do those still happen?). But there's a story behind his fame that is not altogether wholesome, and the majority of Hicksville is Leonard Batts' attempt to uncover the secrets behind this mans fame. Along the way he meets the residents of Hicksville, a utopia of comics awareness where everyone reads them, and most people seem to publish them in some form or other. It's a graphic novel Mecca, obscure, but known to the true artists and writers of the world.

Hicksville is told as a story, but there are so many meta moments within it that sometimes that story is hard to remember. Characters within the story read comics, and as they read them, so too does the reader, so that sometimes it's difficult to remember where the actual thread of the tale stands. But Horrocks always manages to bring it around, and in doing so rewards us with these meta-experiences.

This is the type of title I would recommend to just anyone. Having some knowledge of the history behind comics isn't essential, but it's surely helpful, and at the very least I'd recommend waiting until you've wet your feet into the genre before diving into Hicksville.