5 out of 5

When Death blows his brains out because there are too many dang zombies, I was sold.

Problem: Ben Catmull material is slim.  Monster Parade is a magical mystery of world building and dark comedy; Ghosts and Ruins an even more focused variation on the same, with the spin of appealing as an art book as well.  I dug what I was reading, but the question remained: were these just fortunate snapshots?  After finally ordering Paper Theater, while the humor might mine a similar vein, the approach is loose enough to suggest that Mr. Catmull’s approach is definitely purposeful, and that, furthermore, the humor is a real thing and not just a byproduct of letting his imagination wander.  So you get to straight forward just laugh at the strips in Paper Theater.  Had I read this first, perhaps I’d consider Ben’s work too loose, so the read is actually more successful with the hindsight of knowing the polish he’d book on books, at the time of Theater, to come.

PT is a magazine-sized comic of shorts, housed snugly between some thick, glossy covers and printed – black and white – on clean paper stock.  The style maintains Ben’s line-d, etchy style, but only a couple of strips approach the type of detailing evident in his later work, and within those there’s some appreciable variation to the depiction of humans, and use of perspective and paneling, which just at a high level offers nice variation for an anthology book.  But what was even more fascinating were the strips that were done in an almost scribbled fashion, but still in Ben’s thick-lined manner, akin to Johnny Ryan’s Comic Book Holocaust-draw-it-on-a-whim style, which undeniably gives the page energy.

So ya got the art chops, and ya got the subversive, laugh-out-loud humor.  What’s most fun about Paper Theater is how it flirts with an indie confessional style; at a glance you might even mistake it for something with its heart on its sleeve.  But read a little closer, and all of those soulful, ponderous moments are twisted into genius comedic horrors: sand blowing out people’s eyeballs; the world going to hell when you run out of whisky; actually going to hell and mistaking it for space…  Alas, this just makes the dearth of available Catmull material all the more devastating.  I survive by giving this a glowing review.