Haspiel’s career has shuttled him across many parts of the industry, from his start as a teenage art assistant to ’80s icons Howard Chaykin, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Walt Simonson to his big break illustrating various American Splendor stories for the late Harvey Pekar to his work on multiple comics for Marvel and DC. “I was born and bred in the Upper West Side but found my heart in Brooklyn,” he says of moving to the Carroll Gardens neighborhood almost 21 years ago. The borough has remained a muse for Haspiel for decades. At one point, the fallout from a super-heroic battle is compared to the effects of Hurricane Sandy, and the comic even opens with a real-world event that inspired Haspiel to approach this project: a prank in which the American flags atop the Brooklyn Bridge were replaced with white surrender flags. This Brooklyn shares far more in common with the real one than representations in other comics. Haspiel merges broad, larger-than-life super-heroics with tongue-in-cheek humor and loopy pseudo-science, mixed with political messages the author says will touch on “community, gentrification, and how hard it is to make a living as an artist.” The Red Hook offers contemporary commentary dressed as a throwback to a simpler era that the saddened, sentient Brooklyn may be longing to return to. Superhero comics have consistently held a mirror to the times and the society that created them. Acting altruistically doesn’t come naturally to the Red Hook, nor his girlfriend, the Possum, but his new chest implant drags him across the morality divide-a blurry line in Haspiel’s noir-tinged fiction. In a passing of the torch before his death, the world’s greatest hero, The Green Point (anyone familiar with Brooklyn geography will find the names behind Haspiel’s ensemble endearingly familiar), thrusts his Omni-Fist of Altruism into Red Hook’s chest, where it stays permanently clenched around his heart. The titular Red Hook is a super-thief who finds himself transformed, against his will, into a decent human being. “We're exploring what it's like for a borough to reveal itself to be sentient and then literally and physically secede from America to start its own republic where art can be bartered for food and services during a cosmic dawn of new superheroes… well, we have a lot to explore,” Haspiel says. The Red Hook is the first of a proposed trilogy that could lead to many more comics in the New Brooklyn Universe (or “NuBKU,” as Haspiel refers to it himself). Originally created as a serialized webcomic for Line Webtoon, Haspiel collected it as a graphic novel for Image the first collection, The Red Hook, Vol. So begins The Red Hook, the first installment in cartoonist Dean Haspiel’s NYC-centric superhero universe of comics under his New Brooklyn umbrella. Amidst the wreckage watches a dramatic, red-clad figure who appears to foil a bank robbery only to pick up a “$”-marked sack of money to steal the bundle himself.
Pacifica Foundation (George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words) Obscenity Case Files: People of New York v.