BEASTS OF BURDEN by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson (Dark Horse)

The sleepy American everytown of Burden Hill is actually a Buffy-esque Hellmouth, with monsters galore springing up on a distressingly regular basis. The humans, too wrapped up in their mundane human concerns, are oblivious to the supernatural goings-on. Fortunately, the dogs and cats are on the case! They've teamed up, gained some wisdom in their struggles, and even learned a little magic. Together they stand between a vague yet looming occult menace and "all who live, on two legs or four."

Writer Evan Dorkin has explained that when he was invited to contribute a story to the anthology graphic novel, Dark Horse Book of Hauntings, "I was fooling around, I wanted to do a story about a haunted house, tried a haunted dollhouse, didn’t work, so I went with a haunted doghouse." He mentions in pretty much every interview that, once he settled on an animal-centered story, he had artist Jill Thompson in mind from the very outset, for the "storybook" feel he knew she could bring to the project through her evocative watercolors. The resulting story, "Stray," netted Thompson an Eisner Award (her fourth, at the time), and led to three more collaborations, each heftier than the last, one of which earned Thompson another Eisner and another of which won the Eisner for "Best Short Story," until Dark Horse greenlighted a full-blown four-issue miniseries, Beasts of Burden.

Although the first short story was only meant to be a one-off, Dorkin does a nice job of plausibly expanding the narrative. He embroils the animals in further adventures into horror in the subsequent stories, until he just goes ahead and establishes in the miniseries that there's been something systematic rather than coincidental about the threats they've faced, and confers on them a special status as watchers/guardians/hunters against supernatural evil. As for those threats, Dorkin mixes it up very well between hitting traditional horror beats like the pack of zombies in "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie," more outré fare like the demon frog of BoB #1, and in-between stuff like the undead monstrosity in BoB #4.

The most searing tale is "Lost," in BoB #2. Although the supernatural figures very heavily in it, its thematic focus brings to the foreground a very unpleasant mundane reality that serves as an ever-present undercurrent in all the other stories, starting with the first: these animals live in a mainly human environment which has little regard for their instincts, pleasures, or all-too-often even their lives. Even the strongest, bravest, and fiercest among them are vulnerable to neglect, careless harm, and outright cruelty from humans. That grim baseline fact of life (and death) serves as a necessary ballast to the brightness of the daytime settings and the cuteness of the characters, and interjects a note of "social realism" (for want of a better term) into the otherwise quite fantastical proceedings. Perhaps worst of all in "Lost," three gentle creatures horribly lose their innocence as they're overwhelmed into a terrible revenge. Dorkin has said of this story, "People wrote that they had to go hug their dogs or cats after finishing it."

By no means, though, is Beasts of Burden just some dark, joyless slog. Far to the contrary, it's a labor of love by two people who love animals, and a celebration of pets that pet owners can truly celebrate. Dorkin writes appealingly characterizing dialogue:

. . . touching moments of loyalty and affection:

. . . and just plain fun stuff, like this:

As should be obvious by now, Thompson's glorious art sells all of it--every character, every action, every bit of scenery, every single moment--for everything it's worth.

Her crowning achievement here is to draw the animals as naturalistically as possible and avoid Disney-fying them, and yet still endow them with a nearly-human expressiveness. She says of this challenge:

You have to take a lot of artistic license to give them more human facial features. Dogs are a bit easier than cats because they have those cutie-pie eyebrows that they use to manipulate you to get food and stuff out of you. But I have to add a little bit to anthropomorphize them a bit in their facial features.

With the cats, she takes even more license to make them even more cartoony at times. The character Orphan looks fairly realistic on the cover of BoB #3:

In fact, Thompson usually depicts Orphan with a slightly lighter touch, as evident in the pictures above. But when it comes to stronger emotions, she seems more willing to go with broader expressions, even sight gags:

Her prior manga work sometimes seems to inform her exaggeration of emotion in the cats, for example in this panel, where Orphan (painted black) sports a practically super-deformed expression:

And then there's Dymphna, who arrives in a swarm of black cats in this whimsical yet subtly menacing image:

Thompson always stylizes her to one degree or another, as part of her mystique and appeal:

As should also be obvious from panels above, Thompson can damn well deliver the horror and action as needed. She might favor a more subtle brand of horror (she always says she does in interviews), but when the story calls for blood and guts, she serves it up steaming hot with the best of them. And it strikes a satisfyingly jarring juxtaposition with her Norman-Rockwell-bordering-on-Thomas-Kinkade small-townsy scenery of Burden Hill.

These comics are just beautiful to look at and engaging to read. In my review of Sara Gruen's circus novel Water for Elephants, I noted that,

Tolkien once mentioned the "desire to converse with other living things" as one of our "profounder wishes"; the "sense of separation of ourselves from beasts" is one of our "ancient limitations," and overcoming it is among the foremost of our "old ambitions and desires" which touch "the very roots of fantasy."

Beasts of Burden firmly grasps those "very roots of fantasy." The fourth and final issue concludes with a promise of more to come, and I can only hope Dorkin and Thompson keep it. I highly recommend this for any fan of horror comics, especially those with a soft spot for dogs or cats. Check out the first three stories for free at the Dark Horse website!