Music is an integral part of Hopeless Savages, but it’s not the focus. This comic is about a cast of characters, a family of brilliant and insane individuals, and their trials and tribulations. Their world so steeped in musical culture that music itself is barely referred to; it just exists in every frame, a catalyst for the events, a setting for the relationships and hijinks that ensue. Author Jen Van Meter has a gift for creating personalities and a keen ear for dialogue, and she’s woven a rich tapestry in the decade and a half she’s been chronicling these characters’ lives. (She’s also enlisted some of the top artists in the business to provide the visuals for these stories, including Andi Watson, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Christine Norrie, Chynna Clugston, Ross Campbell, and a few others.) It’s a rock and roll soap-opera sitcom adventure, an eighties coming-of-age movie on paper, a family comedy-drama for the MTV generation.
Nikki Savage and Dirk Hopeless are a couple of punks who met while touring clubs in the 70s, then gave up their musical careers to get married and start a family. The four children that resulted have followed in their parents’ nonconforming footsteps, and it is their adventures that form the nexus of the series.
Zero is the youngest Hopeless-Savage, and she tends to serve as the narrator of events, the one who explains to the reader what’s happening. Of course, she also tends to invent her own words, so it’s a bit questionable how helpful her explanations are. She plays in a band, goes to high school, and has a sarcastic-yet-earnest approach to life that makes her an endearing protagonist.
Her older siblings (Twitch, Rat, and Arsenal) have each grown up, moved out, and gone in their own directions: Rat is the oldest sibling, and though he had a tough time dealing with his parents in earlier years, he has since returned to the fold and become a vital part of the family dynamic. Twitch is an artist, a dapper man-about-town, and is in a long-term committed relationship with his boyfriend Henry. And Arsenal is a martial artist, a bit of a loose cannon, and the catalyst for many of the family’s adventures.
One of the most exciting things about the series is all the directions the stories can go. Over three mini-series and a handful of short stories, we’ve seen members of the H-S family dealing with sexuality, kidnappings, espionage, friendship, bullying, fashion, music industry politics, prejudice, and first love – and it’s all been handled with style and dignity and grace. (And occasional fisticuffs, but they are still punks, after all.) All the serious issues, good and bad, have been approached together as a family.
And while they are a family, they’re not in any way interchangeable. Each member of the cast has a clearly defined personality, a unique voice, and a distinctive look, and it’s that level of craft that makes Hopeless Savages such a great comic. It allows each story to be unexpected, pointed in a new direction, yet totally consistent with the preceding. The characters grow, they change, they develop, but they do so in a way that they remain distinctly themselves.
All the Hopeless Savages material to date has been collected in Hopeless Savages Greatest Hits, 2000-2010, from Oni Press. A new series (with art provided by Meredith McClaren) is coming soon.
The complete series of our Pop Music Comics articles can be found here.