Ball Peen Hammer was never meant to be a comic. It's clear, from the claustrophobic setting of a basement and a clock tower to the long silences and close-up panels of characters' expressions, that this graphic novel is a parable. The post-apocalyptic world outside is a foil to reinforce the claustrophobia and paranoia of those two little rooms. This review contains spoilers.
Ball Peen Hammer is about three art forms: music, writing, and acting. Welton is a musician, Underjohn is a writer, Exley is an actress. All three are part of a commune of artists who have seen been scattered from the Undertunnels by the Syndicate, an oppressive regime of gas-mask wearing soldiers. Adam Rapp, a novelist and playwright himself, is merciless in his critique of these three pathetic creatures. Welton is a shiftless guitarist, never leaving the basement and playing the same song over and over about a woman he loved - but is too frightened to try to find her or save himself. Underjohn is immune to the plague but returns to Welton's basement to write about his experience, cataloguing the slow death of the bleak world around him. Exley insists on wearing her little black dress and up-do hairstyle even in the middle of a city besieged by acid rain and wild dogs.
Ball Peen Hammer is about love lost. Welton, who fell in love with Exley, is paralyzed by the experience, stuck in a perpetual state of yearning for a moment he can never reclaim. Underjohn was in love with a man who died from the plague, but never expressed his affection for him before he passed. Exley carries Welton's child and in her journey to find him regresses to acting - as a mother, as a teacher - to Horlick, a thirteen-year-old street kid who lives in the clock tower with his older brother, Dennis.
Ball Peen Hammer is about filling holes. There are emotional holes in all of the characters, but there are also physical holes: the Collector, who slides in and out of manhole covers to ring bells, repair lights, and tattoo numbers; Horlick, who reenacts American Pie with a melon; Welton, who can never get his toilet to flush; Underjohn, who fled the underground commune after it was filled with concrete by the Syndicate.
Ball Peen Hammer is about the loss of innocence. There are sacks in the basement. Underjohn discovers later that he's a Sacker, whose job is to use a ball peen hammer to fill those sacks. Welton, a Dragger, is haunted by the ghosts of those he helped drag into the basement. Exley inserts herself into a family that doesn't want her. And Horlick pretends he is much tougher than he lets on.
Ball Peen Hammer is not a glimpse into a larger world, part of a running series, the beginning of a comic book franchise, a happy story, a quick read, or meant to be understood literally. It is Rapp's No Exit, banished to comic form because nobody's going to want to see a play that revolves around killing kids with a hammer.
