3 crampons out of 5

The DC / Humanoids line is hit or miss, but given infinite resources I would buy everything they publish.  The presentation is prime and the foreign flair to the writing and art are just a little different from what you normally find on the comic rack.

“Different Ugliness, Different Madness” is a perfect capsule of the hit or miss mix, offering up a unique tone and clean/sloppy art style without the too-cool-for-school feeling I get from publishers like Drawn & Quarterly.  The pacing is cinematic – close up on a face, scene change, camera pulls out – but we end up with what feels like a short story.  It’s a really compelling glimpse at a moment in time, but the initial setup makes it seem like there’s something more emotional in store that never comes to the fore.

We open to a TV show telling us a little bit about the history of famous golden age radio star Lloyd Goodman.  Goodman disappeared at the peak of his fame and then returned a while later, revealing something that was a shock to his audience…  This is the tease that leads into Helen, an old woman, being led by her daughter to a decrepit train station.  Helen’s telling us about the past, reminiscing.  She sits down to reflect.  And now we’re into the story proper, following Helen during a turbulent point in her life, where she meets an unnamed man with whom she only spends a little time and yet who makes a large impact.

Malés art style is distinctive – there are no shades of grey, it’s all heavy blacks and whites.  Instead of the Mignola / Miller style of using the contrast to accentuate the positive and negative space, Malés simply seems to draw and ink that way: shadows are flat black, and everything else gets a nice thick line.  He alternates panel detail such that one or two larger panels will offer up a lot going on, then balanced out by smaller panels that just focus on faces and a few lines.   This prevents pages from being too cluttered.  The cartoonish simplicity of the style mixed with a focused accuracy in his figures (every character is recognizable) gives the whole story a somewhat surreal feel, even though this is definitely a realistic, non-fantastic, straight-forward story.

But it all passes by pretty obviously and quickly.  What would seemed to be an intended twist in the story, though apparent, is even given a way by a blurb on the back cover.  This would be a winner as a movie, with stars and a director who could draw out the silence when necessary, but as a comic it feels like an epilogue to a larger tale.

buy me