Broken Frontier

The absolute best comic you have never, ever heard of, Monster Parade is horrifying, eerie, unforgettable, and unputdownable. In short, it’s genius in 32 pages.

Imagineif Edward Gorey and EC Segar (creator of Popeye) teamed-up to create Where the Wild Things Are as a horror anthology for adults, and the result would be something very much like Monster Parade. There are two full-length stories and two shorts in issue #1, the longer weaving remarkably haunting narratives while the shorter, interlude-length bits craft an indelibly immersive atmosphere. Writer/illustrator Ben Catmull – last seen in full in 2001’s Xeric award-winning Paper Theater one-shot – has spent the last five years putting together a style of story and visual substantiality that makes MP a vastly richer reading experience than his freshman outing managed. Publisher Fantagraphics is no stranger to dark, chiaroscuro-style showcase solo books (they regularly publish the works of Richard Sala, Renee French, and Francesca Ghermandi, to name but a few) though none have approached the sheer effortless, visceral aesthetic heft that Catmull delivers inside this single issue of Monster Parade.

Looking at the stories themselves, the first, "Winter Storm," is a prologue of sorts – short, outdoors, and in the rain, three attributes which Catmull has noted the smaller vignettes of the ongoing series will all share. A boy stands outside, and is quickly overtaken by wind-swept clouds that blot out the sun and plunge him into a countryside filled with giant beasts of outlandish design. One after another they approach, each more sinister than the last, and the boy observes them voyeuristically, like a mere bug able to unselfconsciously study an unawares man. The storm rages, the rain falls, and leads us to a train, which holds within the subject of the second story.

This tale, "Monster Express," is the most purely enjoyable of the lot, following the Kafkaesque boredom of an elderly passenger who is forced to perpetually wait within his compartment due to a monster being on the loose elsewhere onboard the train. He is forced to share space with a somewhat unhinged, socially lunatic companion who provides a great dose of comedy relief while further contributing to the tale’s steadily rising sense of unease. Time and again he tries to exit, to relocate and even go to the bathroom, yet at every turn a harried attendant informs him that the monster is where the sir wishes to go, and therefore he must continually remain seated, and wait. The tale is lengthy, brilliantly paced, and as unavoidably eerie as it is blackly hysterical.

The story ends with a chillingly EC Comics inspired finale, and as the train travels on the reader is brought glissading back into the rain, back into a wilderness filled with all manner of uncanny beast and abnormal brute. Catmull uses this interlude as a showcase of surreal, successfully freakish moments of bastard nature, and pulls us happily, raptly into his final full-length:

"Civilization Studies Illustrated," in which the full exploration of a town whose name is unpronounceable (and even untypeable – I tried!) is given, a journey reminiscent of any one of the aforementioned Edward Gorey’s books, in which a tour of some bizarre vista is undertaken with a casual, imperial air, regardless of the horrendous sights witnessed. In…er…"CSI," the small, imperturbable residents are spotlighted next to the unearthly events, structures, and neighbors which they are made to reside side-by-side with. Though the sense isn’t that they are imprisoned forcefully as such, but rather that – much as a small town might reside in the nadir of an active volcano or atop a burning, fuming coal mine – the quiet, simple folk seem to accept that their lot is to survive as best they can, though fate might have them snatched by a Yeti or trampled by a sea of bears should they be so unfortunate.

And therein lies the heart of Monster Parade: that the horror of things is in our oblivion, our lack of knowledge as to the darker corners of the earth and our willful blindness to the inherent dangers of inevitable natural catastrophe (California, anyone? New Orleans?). Our inability to understand our place within the larger scheme of inhuman things allows us to live but possibly, at any given moment, blunder vulgarly into disaster and death and disorder. "That’s life," we say, and indeed, so it overwhelmingly is in the many, myriad corners that lurk within the pages of Monster Parade. Catmull has crafted a masterpiece of gothic, Victorian, mood-saturated horror that is as unsettling as it is thought-provoking and immeasurably entertaining. It’s only $3.95 and took the artist five years to make, so it should be a commitment your wallet can effortlessly ante up to!

# # #

For ordering information on Monster Parade go to www.fantagraphics.com