Trailer Trash

(Tundra, 1992-1996)
™ and ©1992 Roy Tompkins

Trailer Trash is a bitter little series from the early 1990s underground. Creator Roy Tompkins brings a savage wit and dense, relentlessly ugly drawing style to a series of dead-end tales set in the strip-mall desolation of middle America. Tompkins uses a clean, monochromatic inking technique similar to Charles Burns (Black Hole) to drench the pages in swaths of feathery black brushwork, but while Burns uses the effect to create a vaguely disconcerting comic realism, Tompkins goes for whole-hog surrealism to underscore the grotesque quality of his subject matter. Everything in Trailer Trash is intentionally tasteless and overdone, from the sensual-assault artwork to the shotgun-blast satire of “Harvey the Hillbilly Bastard,” “Bad Times” or the terminal “Swamp Hick.”

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