Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown
Writer/Artist: Mike Mignola
Colorist: Dave Stewart
Letterer: Clem Robins
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
It’s only January, and we already have what some (myself among them) would call a major comics publishing event — a brand-new world of folklore-inspired stories drawn by Mike Mignola. That’s what we get this week with the publication of the excellently-named Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown, a new project on which Mignola is joined by his frequent collaborators, colorist Dave Stewart and letterer Clem Robins.
As a tremendous fan of all things HellboyI came into this book incredibly excited for new Mignola work. And, I’m happy to report, I absolutely loved it. As Mignola writes in his later, this entire project was essentially born of his reading an Italian folktale about a kid who goes bowling with corpses. He knew from that moment that he wanted to adapt it, eventually. Then, in a flight of fancy after telling people he was “semi-retired”, he ended up building an entire new world for the story to take place within, and that’s what we get here.
The book is structured in a way that essentially tells the story of how Mignola made it. It’s called Bowling With Corpses…& Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknownand the marquee story is pretty obviously Bowling With Corpses. It’s the first in the book, and, in fact, by the third page we get our kid bowling with corpses. It took two pages of setup to get us there, and one gets the feeling that the creator would have got to the corpse bowling even sooner if at all possible. It’s an oddball and macabre story as the title implies, and it’s the strongest in the book, a great way to open this world and quickly deliver on the perfect title.
And not only is it excellent, but it feels like something fresh from one of the great living cartoonists. The lead character is odd and funny in a very different way than Hellboy and his friends are odd and funny. He’s got an appendage-related weapon the way Hellboy does, sure, but that is where any (admittedly loose) comparisons stop.
This book as a whole is much less grounded in any recognizable reality or history than any of Mignola’s past work too, feeling more fantastical, if not all together allegorical. It almost feels like after a career of adapting folklore into real world stories, Mignola has internalized the trappings of world folklore so thoroughly, that he can’t help but forge his own mostly-new tradition and mythos from all that he’s learned. There’s familiar folklore patterns, but they’re all laid out in new ways.
And for someone in self-described semi-retirement, Mignola’s artwork is as interesting as ever in this book. In fact, there’s a couple spots — especially in the world tour endcap story, Lands Unknown — where he delivers surprising fantasy flourishes that are likely to be among the most interesting comics art of the year.
Ultimately, this book is not quite 100 pages of stories that you read quickly yet feel very dense when you think about what you’ve read afterwards. Bowling With Corpses is a stunning book that begs multiple readings, perhaps as soon as you’ve set it down. There are talking animals, steady displays of hubris, and other uniting creative choices throughout, but in the end, Bowling With Corpses feels like an introduction to a much larger new project from one of comics true living legends. And that’s a very exciting start to the comics year.
Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown is available now
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