Today I learned about a new-to-me comic to binge on. Megg, Mogg, and Owl is a (extremely NSFW) tragi-comic gross-out experience by Australian cartoonist Simon Hanselmann, who has has been publishing it on Vice since 2012.
My introduction to Hanselmann’s work came in the form of this recent interview with The Fader, which describes the comic’s cast as “a stoner witch named Megg, her gross feline partner Mogg, their fucked up party pal Werewolf Jones, and Owl, the pushover they freeload off.”
The presence of Werewolf Jones is what made the Fader interview appear in my news feed, but after reading only a few cartoons, Megg, Mogg, and Owl has already become a work in which the werewolf character is incidental to my enjoyment. As the Fader article observes, there’s something deeply cathartic about its miseries and minor triumphs.
Hanselmann’s comics address the dingiest crevices of the human experience—suburban ennui, body freakouts, and acid trips—but none of his characters are human, which just makes them that more relatable. And for all its absurdist, stoner tendencies, his work aims a magnifying glass at the anxieties, delusions, and often crippling self-doubt we all feel but rarely talk about.
There are nearly 40 comics on Vice and more odds and ends on Hanselmann’s site. I plan to inhale it all much like I inhaled Achewood in 2005.