This is it. From Hectic Planet: Checkered Past this is the most Gen X comics panel ever created:
When you’re so poor, tired and alienated that the only thing you can think of to bring a little light in your life is a shitty overpriced chocolate milk substitute drink and you can’t even afford that. Welcome to Reagan’s America, except this is 2074 and what you’re reading is supposed to be a light hearted space opera sci-fi comic about underground Pirate Corps sticking it to the man. Instead it’s a series about twentysomething slackers with no jobs, no money, no future, living from day to day adrift in a world with no use for them. They survive on a diet of insipid pop culture references, underground zine culture and ska. Mix Clerks with Repo Man and 2-Tone and you sorta get what Hectic Planet was about.
Hectic Planet was Evan Dorkin’s first series and it shows. The beginning is a bit rough but can see his art improving as the series progresses. Everything that he would later put in Milk & Cheese or Dork! is already here in an embryonic form. The density of the writing and art, the pop culture trivia, the background of quiet ennui & depression that’s present throughout brought on by the knowledge that there’s no place for you in the real world nor do you want one: this is perhaps the most Gen X comic ever created. Written in the late eighties, it anticipates the pop culture of the nineties, the depression after the false dawn of Reaganomics failed to turn into a mushroom cloud and a whole generation had to get used to the idea that they would have to become adults after all.
