Beasts of Burden

Evan Dorkin writes animals better than most writers write people. I mean that two ways. The animals of Burden Hill have such clearly recognizable voices and personalities & Dorkin accomplishes a lot of their characterization in a very few pages, making his furry sleuths as immediately sympathetic and endearing as the animals I remember from Homeward Bound. But even if you ignore the fact of their four legs & look at them each on a basic character level, they're still more completely developed on an individual basis than many human characters on the comic stands today. I get more out of two panels of Beasts of Burden than I do out of two full issues of Joe the Barbarian, and that's resident deity Grant Morrison. So Dorkin is impressive.

And Jill Thompson is phenomenal. She has this classic-looking watercolor painted style - I don't know enough about art to say exactly what she uses, maybe it'd be obvious to someone with art smarts, but whatever she does, it looks delightful. The art almost has a kind of 40's Disney feel - it's cute and cartoony, but it's also amazingly detailed and expressive. So everyone looks totally cuddly and adorable, instant love.

And then something comes along, say, a giant frog, and devours some hapless pup and then the giant frog regurgitates its own insides and then the giant frog explodes into tiny regular frogs after the Burden Hill gang tears out its tongue, severing its spiritual anchor. You know, 'cause it was an aggregate demon. The giant flesh-eating frog. Aggregate. Demon.

Oooh riiight, Beasts of Burden is really about a crazy fucking crew of paranormal animal detectives investigating X-Files-level insanity in the picturesque & sinister town of Burden Hill. Fucking awesome. Four issues out so far, and a couple stories printed back in those hardcover Dark Horse Book of the Dead anthologies. Aggregate demon frog!