4 out of 5

I may have missed a beat in my Sweeper lore, but our cleaning crew of person, robo, cat, and bird now also includes a dog, tasked – on this chilly eve in Bolt City – with attending to the graveyard.

Employing a dusty shading / gradient to maintain the omnipresent gloom, Sears dials in a hilariously over-the-top spookiness of crumbling architecture and masked graveyard attendees as the crew arrives, offset by lovely, human Searsy details like a half-drunk soda left next to the looming gate.

Of course, the gloom is rendered harmless by duty: robo isn’t flustered by the spook who keeps replacing the flowers on the graves, and no one questions why the mauesoleum is suddenly clean (…thanks to the skeletons who stepped in to help).

This is really a lot of fun, and dials in the “plot” of these Sweepers over the slightly looser entries; I think my very teeniest tiniest gripe is that Ben’s nighttime shading can sometimes burden the page to the extent that I lost some details – like didn’t realize bird was even in a couple panels until I went back to them. It’s a tricky balancing act of details vs. focus in a two-color book (green ink on off-white paper this time), and only goes ever so slightly astray.