I’ve tried to offer enough of Collin’s words and art to convey a sense of his simple but refined style. Collins offers a clear depiction of difference-how it’s first feared, then resisted and attacked, and eventually absorbed and recycled. The Beard Event eventually becomes “A story many times retold and resold,” complete with its own museum (enter through the gift shop). Fits of nonconformity inevitably become trends, then commodities.
In an unexpected and rewarding fourth act, Collins examines the aftermath of what comes to be known as “The Beard Event.” The Untidiness that happened while the citizens of Here were distracted dealing with Dave becomes the new normal. All kinds of 21st-century anxieties writhe under the text: fear of immigration, the collapse of cultural homogeneity, ecological devastation-the end of a particular way of life. The angry mob castigating poor Dave call him a terrorist, but they are the authors of their own terror. While the island of Here is clearly a stand-in for England, Collins’s satire of xenophobia and the dangers of groupthink will resonate pretty much everywhere. Collins attacks conformity and fear of otherness, but also depicts just how complex and horrifying otherness can be. The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil is an allegorical fable. In their battle against the beard, they overlook the greater war on weird. United against a common foe, the citizens of Here are nevertheless distracted, letting their grooming habits slip. Police, military, the media, and eventually the entire society become entangled in the crisis. The beard quickly becomes a national emergency requiring enormous resources. When the first hairs do arrive, Dave’s interior existential crisis spills outward, his messy difference oozing out to disrupt and upset the tidy normalcy of Here.
The realization leaves him abject, torn, and destabilized, even before his beard appears. Dave’s psyche is haunted by There its very existence threatens both body and mind. Collins renders this anxiety in a remarkable series of panels that concretize Dave’s nightmare of otherness:ĭave’s nightmare highlights his subconscious realization that there cannot be a Here without a There.
That dread manifests in the fabled land of There. Dave fits like a cog into his tidy world until a beard erupts from his face, severing him from society.ĭespite its neat and tidy contours, an omnipresent dread of otherness gestates in the egg-shaped isle of Here. Stephen Collins’s début graphic novel The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil tells the story of Dave, an especially average (forgive the oxymoron) guy in the neat-and-tidy island of Here, a place where conformity rules and difference is unthinkable.
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