In Hicksville, Leonard Batts travels to a small town in New Zealand where everyone reads comics and discovers the true value of the comics medium as a mode of personal communication. Through this narrative, Dylan Horrocks expresses a theoretical approach to the comics medium, in which comics is understood as cartography. Like cartography, Horrocks suggests, comics should map the creator's subjective view of the world by charting his personal experience. While this prescription may pertain to most fiction or art, Hicksville privileges the intertwining of subjectivity and cartography in comics by suggesting a sort of graphic magic inherent in and possibly unique to comics.

The paper introduces Hicksville in light of Scott McCloud's imagination of comics' participation with other media in mapping the world. By analyzing the interpolated stories that appear as comics within Hicksville, I argue that Hicksville privileges comics in this cartographic capacity. The mini-comics of one Hicksville resident, Sam Zabel, reveal the need to write from personal experience. Emil Kopen, a fictional comics creator who calls himself a cartographer, links comics to a peculiar definition of cartography. Combining these two characters' ideas, Horrocks seems to argue for comics' similarity to cartography, in that comics are subjective charts of personal experience. My reading of Hicksville differs from Horrocks' on this point: he has written elsewhere that any art can be seen as cartography. I argue that Hicksville privileges this theoretical approach and suggests a unique link between comics and cartography, because, as Horrocks demonstrates, the relationship between space and time in Kopen's definition of cartography most perfectly fits that in comics. Furthermore, this link suggests that both creators and readers should think of comics as cartography. By thinking of comics as cartography, Horrocks defines an ideology for the proper use of comics, which I explain in analysis of Leonard Batts' salvation and his understanding the true nature of Dick Burger's sin- the antithesis and nemesis of Hicksville.