4 out of 5

There was a particular range of sloppiness that 80s and 90s underground comix allowed for, but when it got too loose, you were pretty much destined for the fringes.  The guys who “made it” tended to have notable, and fairly developed, styles.  There are absolutely exceptions, just meaning to be an old fuddy duddy and suggest that there was still an ‘artistry’ demanded of those trying to make a name for themselves, at whatever level.  Which will make it sound like a slap to many when I say that same requirement is lacking nowadays.  Maybe yes, maybe no; if anything, I think it’s allowed for more creativity, as the boom of web comics (and the no-cartooning-training-required non-roadblock) has resulted in a true slew of work vying for our attentions, all of variable quality, both in terms of the content and the visuals, and opening the floodgates wider means a higher percentage of smart-ass people will pass through.  Perhaps they don’t have the relative polish of some of those early undergrounders, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t carved out a style that is truly their own.

Sure, sometimes the rawness of the web’s offerings hides schooled skill, but it doesn’t matter.  When K.C. Green started unleashing his gleefully random and cynically snarky and darkly humored Gunshow upon the world, his high-school-scribbles style was a highlight of the strip, tapping into an expressiveness that sometimes comes across better with the most basic of shapes.  And over the years he’s certainly added to his bag of tricks, building up longer-form storytelling skills and composition and pacing achievements, but I’m happy that the art still has a rather sloppy look to it.

Out of Gunshow came Graveyard Quest, about an Uncle Fester-ish looking fellow who’s the last of a family line of gravediggers, living contentedly if unsatisfied in his shack in a graveyard with – why not – the bones of his mother to keep him company.  When the bones go missing, he (logically) blames the ghost of his father, and so plots a path to Hell – guided by a mole – in order to get dem bones back.  Do you imagine hijinks ensue?  You are correct.  The book delights when it’s going for the random crown; it stumbles, actually, when trying to piece some of its plot together into something more meaningful, but thankfully, such events are rare.  Oni has done us the favor of applying the rich color printing to a collection of the Graveyard Quest adventure, and though its 200 pages will pass by relatively quickly, it’s worth the $20 bucks considering all of the laughs you’ll get out of it.  Heck, even the cover (by Allison Shabet) – a tribute to parody of the box artwork for classic game Uncle Fester’s Quest – earns a laugh, and that’s literally before you get to dive in to the content.  Wrapping back around to the art, there were so many times that I just giggled based on the imagery alone, and it’s all down to the unfiltered nature of it that just captures the zeitgeist of goofiness.  Green finds plenty of room to toss in little art or dialogue winks just because, we can assume, he found them humorous, and the energy sells it: I found them humorous too.

That K.C. tries a bit too hard to give Quest some meaning isn’t the worst sin – rather to try too hard than too little – and for sure, some jokes don’t land.  It would have been nice to cap off this random mish-mash with an equally random ending, but if I’m dictating the arty wills of K.C. Green, I might be putting a cap on the type of genius that it’s capable of producing, and Graveyard Quest has plenty of that on display.