Road trippin’, titty twistin’

You won’t catch us in the passenger seat of Stéphane De Groef’s automobile – the guy has his eye on everything except the road, which is clear from You Don’t Own the Road, the Brussels-based comic strip artist’s debut published by the road hogs at Frémok.

BOOK | You Don’t Own the Road ●●●
Stéphane De Groef Frémok, 88 p., €12

It was obvious that You Don’t Own the Road would not be a pamphlet against speeding SUV’s. As the graphic backbone of Frémok, Stéphane De Groef is cursed with a pair of peepers that for years has been exposed to the dark and sinister experiments in the labs of the ground-breaking Brussels comic strip publisher. Those years in the vanguard of the comic strip revolution have resulted in an unhinged perspective that coldly ignores prejudice, cherishes an irrepressible faith in the narrative power of the comic strip, and cultivates pioneering storytelling every time. You Don’t Own the Road thus does not focus its on-board camera on the long and winding road in the hopes of catching a careening traffic terrorist red-handed, but rather looks at the multiform billboards, motel signs, and the other visual shocks that are so common along the old-fashioned highways of the world.

The “vacancies” and “heated pools” located on the periphery of the great American road trip are elevated in Stephane De Groef to the status of seismograph of human trepidation. What does bring mankind, slackened by too much “progress”, out of its state of lethargy is not the wide landscape you can see through the little window in the fabric cover, but the eternal and unchanging… euhm… bowling alley! But also sex (to quote Chet Pussy from the Titty Twister: “If we don’t got it, you don’t want it!”), eternal beauty (and all means to achieve it), weapons (man's best friends), racial and other exclusions (think racism of the most Southern type and exclusion of the elderly and well-rounded), and religion as the instant whitewasher of whatever sins you might commit in the pursuit of those individual ambitions. And they are not a few: a Fatface Sitting session, family bukkake, or golden shower anyone? A trip to the Mormons Safe Sex house, the Extramarital Dating House, the Kona Kai Club (with "Exotic Porn Cottages”), or the Long Snake (“Free giant penis”)? Or a visit to the Church of God ("Remember God was white") or the Creationism Temple – where it is pointed out in rather poor English (the only occasional minus of the book) that “Darwin is a fake, God design you”?

In keeping with Frémok’s great tradition, You Don’t Own the Road happily inserts some mind-broadening and confusing shit from the extra-lingual world between the Swiss semiotician Ferdinand De Saussure’s clean signifier and signified. The Power W Shop teaches you “how to be white in 3 weeks”, Granny’s Fitness doesn’t accept wrinkles, the Lifting Clinic makes you “forget your old face”, and the Heim House offers messianic salvation if you have your credit card to hand. At the Boulevard Drive-In Theatre you can "ask the helpdesk for negro price”, while the Budget King is serving “veggie food” so you stay attractive and "don’t become fat”... From dry as dust to extra juicy and from hilarious to horrific – what else to think of the Children Park that teases you with the message “Innocence is sexier than you think”. As though the “information” highway that is the internet has taken on solid form.

You Don’t Own the Road is a road trip in naïve and fat coloured pencil strokes that, in just over 80 minuscule pages of 10 by 13 centimetres (the size of the original drawings), takes the measure of mankind and the world. Home again, the conclusion is that both turn out to be rather small, and that progress does nothing to change the moral stagnation of the human race. You don’t own the road, the road owns you!