Inaugural Blog

So this is my inaugural blog, and if you’re here for it, that probably means that you’re one of my friends who adores me and is interested in what I have to say or you’re some random person I friended after a long session of Packrat on Facebook and who has a lot of time on your hands. In either case, I hope that you’re not disappointed. If you are, perhaps you should tell me about it. The last thing I want to do is bore you.

I’m not quite sure what I want to do with this space yet, but considering I just finished the first volume of an incredible new comic book series, I believe I’ll take the opportunity to rave about it while I eat my bowl of Kashi U (a cereal consisting of flakes, granola chunks, black currants and walnuts, and is kosher, by the way) drowning in soy milk (Soy Silk, also kosher).

Apparently House of Mystery isn’t brand-spanking new, it came out at some point last year, but we don’t always hear about such things in Oxford, Mississippi. (Do you hear me, Square Books? Can we please address the graphic novels section problem?) Written by Bill Willingham of Fables fame (and if you haven’t read Fables yet, you’re missing out) and some guy I’m not familiar with, Matthew Sturges, but Wikipedia tells me he co-authors the Jack of Fables series—but I promised House of Mystery is a million times better. The premise is something out of a Lovecraft or Poe short story: a group of people is stuck in a house they cannot leave, running a bar full of patrons who can. Sounds mysterious, right? So far, it is, and the Volume 1: Room & Boredom leaves us at a point of wonder.

The metaphor for the mind is obvious, and Fig, who does some voiceover, and to whom the major plot line seems to belong, studied as an architect. As the bookseller who recommended the series to me said, it reminds a bit of World’s End, volume 8 of the Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, in that it revolves around people from various worlds telling stories at a bar. Thank you, by the way, unnamed, but very tall bookseller with your dog in the store at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. I owe a debt of gratitude to you for introducing me to the series.

Along with the metaphor of the mind is the investigation of stories and storytelling. In the bar, stories are currency—which, as a writer, I can identify. The first patron to tell a story is nicknamed Hungry Sally, because of her insatiable appetite. I couldn’t quite decide whether Sally’s story is a feminist warning or not. It is unmistakably disturbing.

The drawings and Sally’s own words present two quite opposing experiences. Sally tells us that she is courted by the gentleman, the illustration depicts an unappealing human-sized fly. While this is disturbing enough, the birthing of her children—actually maggots who arrive in the world by eating through her body—and her subsequent admission that she could not bring herself to care for the children—depicted by the adult flies feeding off of her blood—leave one to question the parasitic nature of motherhood and being a wife. 

Not pleasant, not at all, and neither is Sally’s resulting guilt. Read it yourself. I’ll leave you to judge and let me know what you think and then to tell me about it. The other story told by a woman also involves romance, but she’s a proxy man-eater.