By Al Columbia
What the hell is going on here? What is this book, anyway? As presented, with nothing in the way of explanation (there's only a table of contents, or rather a list of "stories" without any page numbers, and the title page doesn't show up until 24 pages into the book), it's like the inexplicable artifact of a deranged mind, seeming to be the remnants of a destroyed sketchbook and half-finished art pages and animation cels, pieced together with tape, pencil marks and correction fluid often still visible. Much of the content is just imagery, with the occasional series of pictures containing some sort of narrative, but mostly just presenting one disturbing scene after another. And that's pretty much the entire book, just a non-stop barrage of weird, creepy, strange things happening to the titular pair of cartoony children.
If you delve into Al Columbia's career, you'll find that he's done stories featuring these characters in various places, so some of the content here could be from those stories, or it could all be previously unseen material. Taken on its own though, it's not completely satisfying; the barrage of weirdness is interesting, but there's little in the way of connective tissue. It does, however, do a great job of presenting a disturbing mood of dread and decay, seeing the cute little waifs stumble into one horrifying situation after another, often dying gruesomely only to show up again a few pages later to repeat the process. Columbia has a flair for the grotesque, which, when mixed with such cute cartooniness reminiscent of old-school Disney, makes for an especially creepy juxtaposition.
One can only imagine the actual stories surrounding the glimpses we see here: a multi-limbed man wielding a bunch of knives chases the pair; a rotund, bald man named Cinnamon Jack whose tongue hangs lasciviously out of his mouth collects children's heads from a tree or butchers and cooks kids for dinner; Francie apparently births a horrible, bloody monster of a baby; the kids come across a killer who looks like a mixture of Disney's Goofy and Basil Wolverton's Lena Hyena; a forest of cheery anthropomorphic trees decays into a group of trunks bearing bloody eye sockets and screaming mouths; the pair's benevolent grandparents rise from the dead and join a horde of shambling zombies. And much, much more, some of which seems to make sense and some of which is just incomprehensible, creepy imagery. It's a cascade of horror, page after page of mostly-unfinished nastiness, enough to stick in the mind and cause nightmares for weeks.
As an art book or collection of fragments from Columbia's career, it certainly shows what a good designer and cartoonist he is, and how effectively he can create disturbing imagery. Those knobby-kneed, big-footed cartoons mix with the creepiness and gore well, suggesting a horrible perversion of innocence. The facial expressions are effective as well, with Pim and Francie often looking like inbred dimwits or aloof, disinterested spoiled brats, and the various antagonists bearing evil grins and mutilated, disjointed visages that are recognizable as "human" but altered enough to look wrong.
However, being devoid of any context, the book becomes little more than an accumulation of work, rather than a complete object. Columbia has the artistic chops to craft some incredibly effective horror, but it loses some of that effectiveness when stripped of narrative. Hopefully, he'll follow this up with something with an actual plot (or put together another collection of his previously-published stories), and we can see what he's really capable of.
probably being the prime example. And here's Johnny Ryan with his take, and it's as over-the-top and bodily-fluid-obsessed as you would expect if you're at all familiar with his work. There's pretty much nothing to the comic except a tough, nameless bruiser being thrown onto a prison planet and fighting a succession of other psychotic freaks, until the volume ends with the promise of more to come (which might or might not be true; in what seems to be a never-ending parade of guts-n-gore, there could be ten more installments or there could be none, with little difference either way). It's amusing enough for what it is, but that seems to be an especially well-drawn version of the contents of a fourteen-year-old's notebook, scrawled on wide-ruled paper while bored in study hall. And sure, it looks great, whether Ryan is depicting prehensile intestines enveloping our "hero" in a suffocating cocoon, limbs being severed by a torrent of sharpened pus, a desiccated skeleton nailed to a cactus, an armored body made entirely out of semen, or a full-page depiction of a barbed penis. But what's the point, seems to be the question, if one decides to fret about such things. Worries like that are pretty silly though; Ryan seems to be enjoying himself here, and those who share such memories of role-playing adventures will probably feel right at home. Even as a less-nostalgic outsider to such a scene, it's fun to see what sort of depravities will spurt forth from Ryan's imagination next, but as nice as it looks, it's lacks the satirical bite of his 
. It's fun for what it is, but what it is isn't very substantive. Of course, neither is most of the entertainment we crave, so it's probably best to either enjoy it or move on.
aside, many of those indie comics are lacking in the area of narrative, or at least taking an approach that can alienate those who aren't accustomed to their strangeness. Luckily, if you're looking to bridge the gap between narrative and abstraction, Joshua Cotter's follow-up to 
is here to do so. It is presented as a reproduction of the sketchbook in which it was created, although if it was actually put together page by page in such a manner, that's a pretty impressive feat. It's kind of inscrutable itself, with the opening pages including some dense, seemingly-glossolalic text, blacked-out panels next to ones full of masses of tiny triangles and squares, and captions that seem to describe a fractured mental state, but as one continues to turn the pages, a sort of story makes itself clear, seeing a truck plunge out of the sky over the Chicago skyline, followed by a bunny in a sort of space suit crawling out of the wreckage and having hallucinations in the form of pages and pages of scribbly lines and exploding shapes and colors. Later, that same bunny (or perhaps a different one?) is seen lying in a hospital bed, barely moving, and listening to the sounds around him while having more hallucinations, eventually succumbing to an enveloping scene in which what seem to be different bunny-shaped versions of himself run through an oppressive mental landscape, jostling for superiority until the eventually merge together, then get stuck in some sort of structure while a sort of flaming-headed fox lectures them about emotion and reality, before they undergo another transformation, into a small red twig of a tree, that, after being urinated on by the fox, grows into a thick vine or trunk that plunges up into the atmosphere and seems to obliterate the odd mental machinery of the bunny's mind before withering back into a tiny branch.
