Monthly Archives: October 2010

The DEADcomic Overlook #140: Lovecraft Is Missing

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“The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!” — H. P. Lovecraft


I’ve got a confession to make. By an large, I am not that huge a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. I can count the short stories I’ve read on one hand: “Dagon,” “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” and parts of “Call of Cthulhu” (which I tried to reread before writing this review). I also generally liked the movie Dagon, which was apparently based on a different short story entitled “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” (Dagon was probably deemed the catchier title by studio execs.)

However, I understand why there are plenty of Lovecraft admirers, whose ranks include Neil Gaiman, Benecio Del Toro, Stephen King, and the members of Metallica. The horror imagery is creative, enduring, and highly influential. Movies like Alien, comics like Hellboy, and games like Halo 3 are covered with Lovecraft’s fingerprints. No wonder the internet’s in love with him. Google “Cthulhu,” Lovecraft’s infamous deity with the “pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings”, and you get 4.3 million results. Meanwhile, “Leopold Bloom” only gets you 88,900 results. Take that, Joyceans!

Still, I’m man enough to admit that I’m a relative newcomer to the Lovecraft mythos. Yet, here I am, reviewing Larry Latham’s Lovecraft Is Missing. Maybe I’m not the right guy, stripped as I am of any Trekkie-like obsessive knowledge of the Lovecraft mythos. But the new Star Trek movie thrilled both hardcore Trekkies and newcomers alike. Dare I hope against all hopes that Lovecraft Is Missing provides a gateway to the world of eldritch horrors for the uninitiated? (Incidentally, the phrase “eldritch horrors” will pop up multiple times in this review. It’s sort of required when you’re writing something about Lovecraft.)


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The DEADcomic Overlook #139: Split Lip

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“Our bodies break down, sometimes when we’re 90, sometimes before we’re even born, but it always happens and there’s never any dignity in it. I don’t care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass… it’s always ugly, always. You can live with dignity; you can’t die with it.” — Dr. Gregory House

In the past four years, I’ve had to deal with the deaths of my grandma, my father-in-law, my uncle, my wife’s uncle, and my dear friend who left a grieving wife and four children behind. Every time my wife’s grandma — who turned 95 this year — ends up at the hospital, we all hold our breaths frightened that this may be the last day we see her. My own father died the same year I began this blog. You never get used to deal with it, and every death is a harrowing reminder of one’s own mortality and how short one’s time really is.

That’s when that quote from the great Dr. House haunts me. That picture perfect scene you see in movies where everyone gathers around the bed of a loved one as they slip off into eternal slumber? It never happens. It’s always messy. Maybe you spend a couple months in a brain dead coma. Maybe you live your last hours knowing your immune system is succumbing to the cancer. Whatever it is, it’s always ugly. Always.

Sam Costello’s Split Lip is a horror comic that contains ghosts and murderers and monsters. And yet, it’s the unflinching depiction of death and dying that I find most chilling.


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The DEADcomic Overlook #138: Walking the Lethe

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““We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.” — Charles Lamb

So, what is this “Lethe”?

It’s admittedly an interesting word. I’d imagined that it perhaps was Celtic in origin, owing to the unique spelling. I was wrong. “Lethe” has its origins in Greek mythology. (Curse my inadequate folklore mythology knowledge!)

“Lethe” is the name of one of the rivers in the Underworld. Using Wikipedia, I discovered that the term has been adopted to a variety of usages, almost all appropriate. Lethe is also the name of a river in Alaska, which probably doesn’t do much to increase real estate value in the region. Pictures of the river do impart an Underworld quality. There’s a Sailor Lethe, part of the Sailor Moon metaverse that, if you dig deep enough, can seem to resemble a damn frightening hellscape. Lethe is also a genus of butterfly, which at first doesn’t seem all that hellish at all. Hell butterflies? It is black, though. I don’t know about you, but if Hell had butterflies, they would more than likely be black. And on fire.

The term also appears as part of the title for Walking the Lethe, written by Dan Potter and illustrated by Sam Ireland and Aditia Wardhana. It’s about a man who straddles the world between life and death, and in so doing unleashes forces that mortal man was not meant to see.


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The DEADcomic Overlook #137: Left 4 Dead: The Sacrifice

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“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” — Edgar Allan Poe

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall… who’s the *fearest* of them all?” — The Cryptkeeper

Good evening, boys and ghouls. You may notice a hastily composed icon inhabiting the recesses of this review. Yes, it’s Terror Week. It’s like Shark Week, only TERRIFYING. Welcome to the a season where pumpkins grin from every porch and children beg for candy. But it’s all in good fun. Here at The DEADcomic Overlook, we will be looking at three webcomics dealing with things that go bump in the night.

“Eh,” you say, “you’re a week early. And it’s not exactly my thing. But at least it’s not video game webcomics again.”

Oh, you tease. But you have a point: some time during the summer, video game webcomics dug themselves AN EARLY GRAVE will the crush of coverage they got on this site. Fortunately, Halloween gives me an easy way to break out of this vicious cycle. A new way to refocus.

First up first is a horror webcomic based on a video game — Left 4 Dead: The Sacrifice.

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Josh Neufeld: from webcomics to working for the State Department

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The Washington Post reports that Josh Neufeld is now working for the US State Department. Neufeld created A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (reviewed here), which was serialized as a webcomic on SMITH Magazine in 2007–2008 and won much acclaim from a variety of mainstream publications (including Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today) even before being collected into a hardcover.

“As with my trip to Burma [in March], it seems that — because of ‘A.D.’ — I am being invited to showcase the cultural freedoms of American society, especially in comparison to the more authoritarian-style policies of the countries I’ll be visiting,” writes Neufeld, who leaves today for the Middle East and North Africa as part of the U.S. Speaker and Specialist Program. His three-week tour includes Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain and “a country to be named later.”

Neufeld went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, volunteering as an American Red Cross worker. He blogged about the storm’s social and physical ravages, which led to a serialized Smith Magazine project, a self-published book and then his best-selling graphic novel “A.D.” (Pantheon), which follows the stories of seven real-life victims of Katrina. (In late-August, Neufeld returned to New Orleans — during the anniversary of the hurricane — for a paperback-release party for “A.D.”; the event was attended by two of the victims.)

The State Department invited me “specifically because of the Katrina book, which is blatantly so critical of the government,” Neufeld tells Comic Riffs of his comics reportage. “The program brings in cultural figures who disseminate [this message] — the State Department is proud of that freedom of expression. … They bring me over as a statement of how our civil society welcomes voices of dissent in all forms.”

(h/t Comics Beat)

The Webcomic Overlook #136: Sam & Fuzzy

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Long ago, in the halcyon days of webcomic reviewing, the esteemed Eric Burns-White once coined a term that is apt for both print comics and, now, the rather mature webcomic genre. He called it Cerebus Syndrome:

The effort to create character development by adding layer upon layer of depth to their characters, taking a character of limited dimension (or meant to be a joke character) and making them fuller and richer. The idea is to take what was fun on one level and showing the reality beneath it. ‘Cerebus Syndrome’ refers to Dave Sim’s epic, sometimes tragically flawed magnum opus, Cerebus the Aardvark. Cerebus started life as a parody of Conan the Barbarian starring an Earth-Pig born. Over time, it grew extremely complex, philosophical, and in many ways much much funnier. Then, Dave Sim went batshit crazy and Cerebus went straight to Hell, but that’s for another day. People saw how Cerebus’s humble roots could lead to glorious heights, and as cartoonists get bored with what they’re doing, they decided to pull a Cerebus of their own.

Boredom is generally the key to a Cerebus Syndrome attempt. After a while, even a successful webcartoonist gets tired of fart jokes and sight gags and wants to make these characters more than they’ve been.

It is extremely hard to take a light, joke a day strip and push it through a successful Cerebus Syndrome. Dave Sim did it in stages, and at least in the early days of the transformation brought massive amounts of Funny to cover it over. Done perfectly, one only realizes in hindsight that the strip has turned out to be quite different than it used to be. Done sloppily, the Cerebus Syndrome fails, and the webcomic enters First and Ten Syndrome. Unfortunately, a failed Cerebus Syndrome is an excruciating process for the webcomic’s fans to endure.

Personally, I would’ve called this “Funky Winkerbean Disorder,” and I may yet do so as not to infringe on Mr. Burns-White’s proprietary terminology. But there you go. As we enter the third decade of webcomics, this phenomenon becomes more and more apparent. The most infamous example of Cerebus Syndrome is probably the “Loss” strip from Ctrl+Alt+Del. It’s hardly the first to flip the switch from “wry sarcasm” to “maudlin,” though. The same thing can be seen in MegaTokyo, Sluggy Freelance, Questionable Content, and every webcomic David Willis has ever worked on.

There are times, though, when someone pulls the transition off just right.

When Sam Logan’s Sam & Fuzzy starts, it’s the comic that’s metaphorically about farts and sights that Eric is talking about. But the modern version, the ones that current fans seems to have embraced, is less reliant on random wackiness and is more concerned about telling long-term, cohesive stories. Sure, it’s hardly complex or philosophical… but there is an Earth-Pig. Actually, a Fig Pig. And… I think I may have lost my train of thought here.


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