Weird comics

Sometimes, comics’ unique potential for paring wild imagery and cartoon irreverence results in something unique to the medium. I submit for your appreciation Wonton Soup (Oni), Orc Stain (Image) both by James Stokoe, and King City (Image/Tokyo Pop) by Brandon Graham, three of my favorite comics to come out in the last few years.

Wonton Soup is, at first blush, a typical space opera adventure story, but quickly establishes that it, in fact, is going to overturn every possible trope of the space opera adventure story. The lead character is Johnny Boyo, a chef wunderkind who dropped out of culinary school in order to travel the cosmos, work as a trucker, look for exotic ingredients, recipes and foods and consuming massive quantities of mind-altering drugs. Boyo ignores opportunities to save civilizations in favor of hunting down a new seasoning, and fights off pesky space ninjas with his spatula skills.

What Wonton Soup does for space opera, Orc Stain does for high fantasy, telling the story of, not a darring, muscle-bound hero, but a scrawny, misbegotten orc grave-robber and thief, on the run from the fearsome Orc Tsar. What follows is a story full of bizarre imagery, with bulging-eye backed crab creatures, a half-bear-half-safes that need to be broken into, a poison-throwing nymph witch, all luxuriantly detailed and colored in a style reminiscent of Geoff Darrow.

Finally, King City is the story of a cat master—that is, a man with a cat who can do amazing things like pick locks, pick fights, and pick your brain (literally, in some cases), but only when injected with the right drugs. The cat master keeps a large selection of these drugs in syringes on his person at all times, and with his animal engages in espionage for hire, through a world of mob bosses who eat cannibal sushi, narcotics that transform you into chalk, and an ex-girlfriend he can’t let go, all without breaking his laid-back, emo cool.

What these books have in common is a taste for the strange, a wicked sense of humor, and a willingness to push speculative fiction tropes to their oddest extremes. It is a vision of sf that one rarely sees in prose, where the tropes of the genre are often serious to the point of morbidity. Indeed, while one could make some comparison to the work of Terry Pratchet, who is at least silly, I can’t think of a novel that has the wry hipness of these books, while in comics I can think of several, especially the great Scott Pilgrim. And of course, no novel can have these books instant, visual appeal. In other words, Stokoe and Graham are creating the kind of thing comics does better than anything else, and their work is glorious, addictive fun.

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