Everybody's a critic

Despite the fact of its recycling of theme -- or rather, because of it -- Jack Recess's most recent comic about mail raises questions that the reader cannot easily dismiss. The thematic repitition has forced this reviewer to plumb his own response to the comic, his relationship to the characters, and his relationship to the "characters" that constitute the ongoing narrative of "real life" interactions. Whereas in the previous comic the dialogue of these two souls adrift -- the postman and his nameless antagonist -- constituted nothing more than an atomized, random act of aggression which could be safely "laughed off" as yet another faceless pit stop on the ultraviolent lost highway of Tarantino-era "entertainment", the return of these two characters to the reader's personal sphere negates the safety one finds in that consumerist detachment.

Indeed, the reintroduction of yesterday's chum as today's personal pathos provokes a shock of recognition -- a recognition of our humanity itself. The rage and horror (and yes, eternal hope) of the mailman become our own; too, one must admit, the inexplicable sadism of the woman strikes a chord within the id. It is the very same unasked-for sensation of acute empathy that one periodically experiences in the mysterious, discrete relations which crowd the liminality of our day to day lives: the chance reunions with long-lost lovers from our grad school years in Europe, the brief yet intimate conversations with strangers at Manhattan subway stops, the knowing glances accidentally exchanged with unknown collegues during the most pretentious lectures of our literary conferences. It is the moment when the anonymous becomes the intimate. We've all "been there". And yet Recess captures this sensation so artfully, so brutally yet lovingly, that one can but stop and wonder at the deftness of his touch.