5 out of 5

I’ve checked in with Trondheim here and there, and have definitely been intrigued enough to suspect that a new favorite comic author lie in eventual discovery of his catalogue… but so prodigious a writer is he, I also realized it might take a bit to come ’round to that discovery.

But I think I’m sold with this second McConey collection – wonderfully translated by Europe Comics (or at least I didn’t sense any of the language / pacing hitches some translations suffer from) – which features all of the Trondheim idiosyncrasies found in his blended violence / punny humor / innuendo / obvious-endo / surprisingly sobering humanity / general genre mish-mash, and delivers an anthropomorphic romp that I didn’t dare try to set expectations as to where it would go, because every page made it clear that this was Trondheim’s show.  Which meant that every page made it clear that I didn’t want it any other way, approximating something like a Mel Brooks flick and something that should be impossible to do in comic form but that Lewis executes with seeming ease.

The cast of McConey predates the anthology obsession TV shows like American Horror Story popularized, in which the same “actors” appear in different roles in each tale.  A set crew of bunny and cat and dog are filtered through different scenarios in each volume of these here spiffy adventures, with Gloomtown centered around a haphazard gold rush in a Western town.  And at every haphazard hitch in the story, when you start to recognize a genre trope, Trondheim peels off in another direction, and without any lazy deus ex machinas; all of the story elements are essentially in play from the start, and we get rewarded with referential dialogue, and a play-like ensemble cast that is equally fun to check in with from person to person.

Trondheim’s art is loose but he obviously knows how he wants to direct a page; to look at the art is to assume you’re reading a simple tale – perhaps even a kid’s tale – when everything, in truth, can only be precise to effect the story beats and humor in the exact way that it is.

You realize, of course, that this only means my Trondheim library now must grow…