The Sands By Tom Hart

Black Eye Productions

Tom Hart's drawings are cute. Not cute like the wide-eyed heroines of manga or the over-practiced smiles of Huey, Dewey and Louie: cute like what you'd get if you gave a kindergartener a pen and an ink bottle. With their expressive, uneven lines and simplistic, blocky people, Hart's pictures coax out a tone of intuitive, quiet wonder.

This is child-like art, but it's not being used naively. Take Hart's latest, The Sands, which establishes a trio of characters to explore contemplation, introspection, and wisdom. On one hand, there's Margie, a disciplined woman whose happiness hinges on the success of her career. On the other, there's Butsi, the boy king who disbanded his court and tries to live in a state of total spontaneity. In the middle is Hawk, Margie's husband and Butsi's prospective friend, who does his best to balance whimsy and structure, trying out new places and relationships with a tentative mix of openness and caution.

Beyond the trio's personal travails, there are hints of a military coup against the boy king, and violent confrontation lingers on the horizon in the in-progress comic. This is one of Hart's persistent questions--that of living out Whitman-esque individualism in the modern world--and it's one he's answered ambivalently before. In Hutch Owen's Working Hard, a homeless dissident serves both as an inspiration to young idealists and as a merchandising property for a multinational corporation. In New Hat, a poet is beaten to death. With The Sands, Hart's concerns about living free in society are coming to the fore again, in what is becoming another disarming treatise on the difficulties of not growing up--or of growing up in a way the world doesn't want you to. (Black Eye Productions, 5135 Parc Ave., Suite 5, Montreal QC H2V 4G3 Canada; tomhart@blackeye.com)