“Men In Hats”
Drawn and written by Aaron Farber
Updates daily
Farber is one of few webcartoonists who actually began their online curriculum vitae with their sophomore effort. No stranger to webcomicking in a vacuum, his previous effort Pentasmal rang true, if somewhat obscurist, leaving potential new readers to, as the catchphrase goes, “get nothing.”
His current outing, Men In Hats, is a far more polished product. The Amish-named Men (an arbitrarism, but an effective one) inhabit a Roadrunner-esque approximation of a southwest American desert, with its gaunt, red-ochre-shafted mesas and endless sand; the perfect place for character examinations of topics ranging from the absurd to the not.
Farber’s art style has all the blank draftiness of a New Mexican midnight, but here, it’s not a shortcoming. He hefts Illustrator’s pen tool with a little too much carelessness, and it would be nice to see an expression on the character’s Fisher-Price-meets-1970s-South-Park faces, but with a spate of new shows being rendered vector-style (among them, Cartoon Network’s Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends), perhaps we will see the Men animated on the small screen.
The writing in Men, however, is a tentpole bending under the weight of the big top Farber attempts to bring to the entertainment-starved hick town of our minds. The pseudocognoscentic dissection of minutia in Men in Hats approaches an almost Gigli-istic order of magnitude. Granted, this is all one can do when wandering the desert, but instead of providing a launchpad for speculative discussion, the reader may find himself imbued with a greater appreciation of the woes of Vladimir and Estragon. Both wore very patient hats.
But we already knew the problem with Men in Hats isn’t the hats. It’s the men that wear them.