Lint, Jeff a.k.a. Steve Aylett. The Caterer: Dial I for Inconvenience. Vol. 1, No. 3. New York: Pearl Comics Group, 1975 a.k.a. Scar Garden Media, 2005. 32 pp.

I’m a problematic reader. Virtually everything bores me. I’m rarely able to read a book from beginning to end. I can respect and admire good prose, an animated narrative style and technique. But it’s not enough. Nor is effective character and plot development, or the artful creation of suspense, or a gripping story. Books make too much sense. I want smart, quality literature. But I also want to be confused, misled, deceived, and ultimately fucked with.

Steve Aylett never disappoints me.

In The Caterer, Aylett composes under the meta-pseudonymous guise of a bogus pulp science fiction writer, Jeff Lint, who we first encountered in LINT (2005), Aylett’s pseudo-biography of the idiosyncratic, Phildickian, pain-in-the-ass cult figure and Isaac Asimov wannabe. Disjointed and playful, the pseudo-biography addresses Lint’s social (under)development in equal measure with his many publications, among them Jelly Result, I Blame Ferns, I Eat Fog, Turn Me into a Parrot and One Less Bastard. He is most poignantly described as “a Hemingwayesque figure [who] had developed the ability to speak out of a different part of his beard each time” (5), “too creative to be considered dangerous” (71), and “the child who tried to unearth the bruises underground” (198). As for The Caterer, Aylett says:

This unfathomable title lasted nine issues, during which the hero was never seen to cook or prepare food in any way. The Caterer’s wordless shooting spree in Disneyland in the final issue was as ill-judged as it was relentless, and its blithe use of certain copy-righted characters sank the publishers in legal defense costs (4-5).

The protagonist of The Caterer, Jack Mardsen, is the prototypical Lintesque anti-hero. According to Dial I for Inconvenience, the subtitle for issue 3, whether or not he is a caterer whose profession involves preparing and serving food is uncertain and subsidiary to his many incongruous adventures, none of which, incidentally, have anything to do with food. Mardsen looks and acts like a Ken doll with rageaholicism — red golf shirt, blue pants, full head of healthy blond hair, square face like a young Robert Redford, and a volatile mean-on with apocalyptic potential. The catalyst for this mean-on is a mystery. Like John Ryder in The Hitcher (played by Rutger Hauer in the first-rate 1986 film; replayed by Sean Bean in the pointless 2007 remake), Mardsen’s modus operandi has no tangible basis, although he seems to be at least partly affected by American technocapitalist media, especially when he admits, “I am the newest by-product of America’s crippling dishonesty and evasion … No judgment need be attended to except that which is backed by violence” (20). But, for the most part, he is a darkly merry trickster who acts impulsively and kills at will. Unlike Ryder, however, whose dialogue is severely limited, Mardsen is a blabbermouth. His discourse includes commentary on a range of subjects (e.g. udders, toxic darts, politics, fitness, hens and goats, freedom, cancer, religion, and coffee pots). Jack Mardsen is at once a pop philosopher and a serial killer — as absurdly violent with words as he is with guns.

The cause-and-effect plot of the comic is simple: Mardsen kills people, the cops go after him, and Mardsen stands on top of an inverted vacuum cleaner and enriches everybody’s quality of life ... But there’s more. There’s a wrestling match with a chicken. There’s another wrestling match with a grizzly bear. There’s a sprawling Valhallaic spectacle of naked warriors and orgy-goers, mermen and aliens with mouse heads, interminable bushels of grapes, giant robins and prancing elks, a rotting coliseum that looks like cheese, a pinstriped sky that looks like a zebra hide — all of it superimposed by the image of Mardsen nailed to a tipped over cross. In one panel somebody’s grandmother blows off of policeman’s head with a shotgun. In another panel the Caterer calmly explains to somebody on the phone: “If you take a catfish by the whiskers and pull outward, it inflates into a life raft.” Elsewhere readers can find advice for how to prevent knobbly hands and unsightly colored skulls ...

Like the style of its illustration, which (purposely) appears to have been drafted on cheap wood pulp paper, The Caterer’s ersatz classifieds pages hearken its pulp ancestors. In place of ads for hand buzzers, sea monkeys and exploding chewing gum, however, here we see headlines like HAVE YOUR GARBAGE SET TO MUSIC, KILL ANYONE WHO SEES YOU, LEARN TO CRY MODEL ROCKETS and PYTHON? And at the end of the comic there are two pages featuring letters to the editor, J. P. Drapeau, from avid readers. In one of these letters, Steve Hamper writes:

“Should I read The Caterer every day? If I do, how long will it be before I become ‘without concern’ like Jack Mardsen?” (28).

Of course, all of these people, letters and ads are fake. They are also flagrantly metafictional, calling attention to how The Caterer signifies historical pulp tropes and themes while deepening the Bizarro character of Jeff Lint. Aylett is not the first author to employ such devices. Michael Chabon’s comic The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist (2004), for instance, is written by the fictional protagonists in his Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). More recently, Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele integrated advertisements (among other media) into their science fiction graphic novel, The Surrogates (2006), lending an air of realism and credence to their imagined futuristic dystopia. Both comics are unique and compelling in their own rights. But nothing compares to Aylett’s dynamic sense of meaninglessness, of irrationality, of hard-boiled nihilism. In short, nothing compares to Aylett’s sense of nonsense.

The Caterer is ahead of its time.  Beyond postmodernism, beyond Thunderdome — Aylett’s writing is (r)evolutionary.

— D. Harlan Wilson