(Cover art for the tradepaperback by Mike Mignola)
This week, on a whim, I picked up the ten-buck (cheap!) first collection of Pat McEown and Mike Mignola's Zombie World comic book, "Champion of the Worms." At the time, it was very much a random purchase but geez! How thrilling! How gorgeous! How fun and entertaining and well-written in a world where comic book singles are devoid of momentum. Stuff happens! Bad stuff, too, gross icky stuff like primordial tree monsters being grown from the fat, sweating bodies of museum curators.
I didn't expect the ending at all, was surprised, and then realized: there will be more. Or there is more, probably, at least one more trade available for me to track on down. It unsettles, actually, and the tone is so wildly out of sync with the clean-lined Tintin-esque artwork provided by McEown that it adds a decent extra layer. The characters seem, initially, to be stock adventure strip characters but they show potential for some growth in their adventures ahead. It was fun but it didn't feel quite like fluff. I felt like I had spent my time wisely in reading this comic, which is becoming increasingly rare.
Like most weird and senseless writers, I am an avid consumer of the "foreword" and "afterword" sections of books. I'm a sicko, obsessed with them, as they offer seeds of information about the background process to the creation of the item of art in question. Pat McEown wrote the foreword in this case and reveals how he met Mignola in Victoria, BC and was suitably strange to read at nine in the morning while I hung around downtown, reading and writing. Mignola's afterword was less satisfying, revealing as it does that he more or less tossed off the concept of Zombie World without expecting to do anything with it, and that the whole thing was ultimately McEown's baby, ultimately - Mignola does the plotting, or did for the story in this particular volume.
Altogether a good buy and my god did the ending unsettle me...