3 out of 5

I’m glad I picked this up, as it helped me to finally narrow down what I dig about Harkham, and what just doesn’t do it for me, which is a line I was having difficulty drawing with ‘Crickets.’

Harkham’s main theme would seem to be the horrors found in the mundane.  Sometimes this is exploited crassly, or ridiculously – often in his half-page strips – and sometimes it’s just a blip within a 40-page story.  At the best of times, Harkham hovers over a line between humor and dread, exacerbated by a sense of the surreal.  This was the case with the Golem story in Crickets. and also came into play in “Poor Sailor” thanks to that tale’s rather abstract composition.  But Sammy is of the indie school that his Kramers Ergot supports, and so that means he also has a tendency to do open-ended slice-of-life stories.  These still explore the same theme, but often only as blips – ghosts coming through the wall in one panel of “Somersaulting” – or by focusing on our daily degradations.  And these stories sit on the cusp of something almost happening… which never does.  Such is life, and such is as Sammy represents it.

Everything Together is a collection of shorts and snippets that have appeared elsewhere, book-ending the longer “Somersaulting” and “Sailor.”  There’s a pleasant mix of the different styles and moods mentioned above, plus a couple of drawings (as in non-strips), which distill the disquieting elements of Harkham’s work I love down to these gloriously creepy and odd static images.  But this means about half the collection gets that open-ended stuff, and that just doesn’t do anything for me; I dig Jordan Crane, part of a similar scene, but I tend to get an emotion from his work, whereas Sammy pushes things so far into these studies of mundanity that, upon an initial read, you imagine the story is incomplete.  It’s only after getting a bigger picture – again, thanks to this collection – that I realize that’s just Harkham’s style.

But, let’s say you are a fan; assuming you don’t have all the Harkham odds and ends, this is a pretty invaluable collections of strips from various – probably hard-to-track down – sources.