News of the weird

Recent graphic novels explore strange new worlds

REVIEWS BY BECKY OHLSEN

It's a mad, mad world, all right—even surreal, at least judging by the latest batch of comics and graphic novels. You've got evil hipster faeries on drugs, trash-heap puppets with flies in their eyes, absinthe-addled painters leaping in and out of masterpieces, genetically modified talking pig-dogs . . . it's all there, and it's all weird.

Let's start with those talking dogs. In the far-future world of Glacial Period, by Nicolas de Crecy, the European continent has iced over and everyone's moved "south." A band of intrepid explorers has set out to find architectural and anthropological clues about the frozen continent's vanished culture. Guided by genetically enhanced talking dogs that look an awful lot like pigs, the explorers stumble onto the ruins of the Louvre. Using famous paintings as evidence, they try to piece together a narrative describing the people of Europe. The works of art themselves eventually speak up, correcting and augmenting human interpretation of their significance. Author/artist de Crecy worked in collaboration with the Louvre to create this beautifully painted book—an appendix lists each of the works re-created within the comic's panels. Doubling as an analysis of the way images store and transmit knowledge, it's about as "high art" as you can get in a graphic novel.


In search of the surreal

The Salon by Nick Bertozzi also uses a visual medium to comment on visual arts, and it does so in a similarly bizarre fashion. The young painter Georges Braque seeks the patronage of the famous Leo and Gertrude Stein; quickly invited to join their "salon," he learns that the Steins are terrified. A mysterious blue demon-lady has been prowling the streets of Paris at night, murdering artists and gallery owners. Then comes the weird part: To hunt down this killer, the salon's members (including Picasso, Apollinaire and others) drink blue absinthe, which allows them to enter any painting they choose. They've deduced that the killer is Paul Gauguin's mistress, and she's hiding out in his paintings. The book is vivid and dynamic, all strong lines, intense blues and greens and punchy dialogue. His take on Picasso as a volatile, childlike savant is priceless. Best of all are the Frenchified sound effects: instead of bang! or kapow! you have clonque! and kique!


As surreal as The Salon may be, the latest book by Tony Millionaire is much stranger. The title character of Billy Hazelnuts is a Frankensteinian boy assembled by rats out of garbage, houseflies and mint. He and the young lady of the house, brainy Becky, set out to rescue the moon (which has disappeared over the horizon). They're pursued by one of Becky's suitors, a mad scientist in a galleon captained by mutinous robotic bird skeletons and seeing-eye skunks. Yep. Billy's an odd but well-spoken little beast; unsuccessfully interviewing falling stars about the moon's location, he protests, "These blasted celestials can't even get a story out before they explode in a flash of fire!" It all takes place in Millionaire's creepy sock-monkey universe, with its dizzying lines and button eyes and jam-packed black-and-white panels. His ever-shifting landscapes seem free of gravity, and outer space is always visible just beyond rooftops.


The beautifully bizarre

Billed as the "Lost Prequel to Jimbo in Purgatory," Jimbo's Inferno by Gary Panter is as beautiful as it is bizarre. It's a tall, skinny book whose giant, creamy pages are crammed with Panter's chaotic line drawings in tidily arranged square panels. A companion volume to the equally engrossing Jimbo in Purgatory, Inferno sees its intrepid hero—he of the flattop haircut and musclebound torso—plunging into the vile netherworld of Focky Bocky, a "vast gloom-rock mallscape" filled with all manner of frightened and frightening creatures. The sheer genius of transforming Dante's vision of hell into a shopping mall allows for plenty of absurdist brilliance, most of which plays out in the hilariously over-the-top incongruity of the dialogue. In one panel, Jimbo turns to his tour guide/parole officer, Valise, and asks, "Another river: is it boiling blood?" But no, Valise assures him: "It's REALLY hot Dr Pepper." Think the archaicism of Dante spliced with the aggression of, say, Pulp Fiction. But in a really pretty, gorgeously put-together volume with a cool cover.


A more luscious and painterly surrealism can be found in God Save the Queen, written by Mike Carey and painted by John Bolton. It's the story of an evil faery queen and a half-human changeling who finds herself pulled into a deadly circle of stylish, heroin-addicted faeries. Every page revels in its own incredibly lush but unsettlingly realistic beauty. And the story pulls no punches—it's a dark, spooky and weirdly sexy treatment of grim themes, including addiction, peer pressure, family loyalty, responsibility, forgiveness and taking loved ones for granted. In other words, this is no children's fairy tale.


Startling stories

Dark Horse is a reliably weird publisher, so it's no surprise to find a couple of odd offerings coming from them. Ten years in the making, Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor collects a number of graphic-novel interpretations of Ellison's short stories. They're adapted and drawn by top-notch artists such as Curt Swan, Paul Chadwick, Mark Waid, Gene Ha, Steve Rude and Steve Niles. An eerily lifelike Ellison stares out from the cover drawn by Brian Boland; between stories, the author introduces and contextualizes his works. The stories themselves range from one-joke shorts to more elaborate thought experiments.


Another Dark Horse offering, The World Below by Paul Chadwick—the writer/artist behind Concrete—explores a mysterious sinkhole in rural Washington that leads to a secret underground realm. In a series of short adventures, six treasure-hunters risk life and limb to scour the perilous landscape for potentially profitable new forms of technology. Along the way, they're attacked by all kinds of bizarre creatures—from a giant robotic stove to a race of squidlike symbiotes to an alien society that wants to breed humans as pets. Naturally they're also constantly endangered by their own conflicting personalities and inter-group tensions. Chadwick has likened the book to the TV series "Lost," and it's a fitting comparison.


Panting for puppies

Weird in an entirely harmless and wholly entertaining way (if you're into that sort of thing) is Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs. If there's anything cuter than those big-eyed, tiny-skirted Japanese manga characters, it's Japanese manga puppies. And this book has both. It's the story of an ultra-naive teenage girl, Suguri, who decides to move to Tokyo on her own and gets a job at a pet store. Turns out she has a sixth sense when it comes to dogs. She's crazy for dogs! It's a ridiculous construction and results in all kinds of awkward dog-related situations, as well as miracles of veterinary medicine that save the lives of the cutest puppies ever drawn. Sure it's silly, but come on—who doesn't love puppies?


Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

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