The Fairer Sex, Part XIX, Between the Cracks: The Bride

The true story of Frankenhooker

Here I go again, messing with someone from right down a local freeway. Between the Cracks: The Bride is the work of one man, Harris O’Malley. O’Malley is a phenomenal painter who lives in San Antonio, a city less than a four hour drive from D/FW. He’s the mastermind behind a small publishing house called Studio Underhill and has been making commercial art since 2003. I really urge you to visit the Studio Underhill website HERE and check out his recent artwork.  It’s truly a thrill. Also you can find links to more on his livejournal blog HERE. Note some nudity, so it’s all NWFS.

I’m really jazzed about O’Malley’s painting, so it’s really a shame to be reviewing BTC:TB. Why? The Bride looks to be his first work. While it shows hints of what O’Malley can do, it unfortunately falls short in many places. Sometimes it is pacing and sometimes it is the art. I can excuse it when the plot drags, but I am absolutely livid when I see bland panels coming from a guy who can do so much better.

The story is a retelling of Frankenstein with a few twists added in. First change is the setting. O’Malley has decided to switch from turn-of-the-century Europe to modern-day urban America. Next is the nature and sex of the creature. Our creature is decidedly female and quite passive. Lastly is the thrust of the story has switched from what her creator can do to redeem himself to a story about how, with few exceptions, modern man is actually the monster.

We begin with the title character sitting on a dock, reflecting on her resurrection and the events that followed. Notice a couple of things about O’Malley’s art and story style here. Most of the book is wordless panels like these that allow O’Malley’s art do most of the storytelling. There are times when this is very effective and then there are times when it shows his style’s limitations. His black and white art is very stark and uses very little grayscale shading. Occasionally this renders a frame too dark or a room too spare. He throws a few scanned photos and digital art pieces in a few panels to overcome some of this, but the result isn’t always successful. His color pieces on his website show how emotive his work can be. It’s a shame that we don’t get that impression from his work in The Bride.

Everything following the first page is a flashback beginning with The Bride’s first sights after being revived.

The faceless creator is never shown, his fate is sealed off panel.

Thus the widest divergence from Shelley’s tale takes place very early on. Our creator is out of the picture (quite literally as well) and we are going to focus on the plight of his creature. O’Malley’s art is not trying for a realistic feel, choosing instead to give the impression of real life. Perhaps this is a metaphoric statement on The Bride’s condition as well. She is not really alive, having no parents nor home nor identity, but is instead a stark and solitary figure facing the world completely alone. The metaphor works, but the plotting drags a bit by its inclusion.

The federal agents don’t notice The Bride's disappearance. As she wanders out into the city, she narrowly avoids being struck by a passing car. She crawls to the sidewalk and sits against a brown stone building. Two young men stop to help her.

This will be the last time anyone in the book is sympathetic to our title character. But even these good Samaritans are turned off by her odd appearance, judging her as potentially mentally unbalanced. 

The message here is clearly that even good-hearted people will only go so far before stopping in their own rational self interest. The best our pair will do for her is slip her a few bucks and tell her to get some help. Her next encounter is entirely the opposite.

Yes, this gentleman is definitely up to no good. He’s got that evil look from every “teen girl runs away from home” movie I’ve ever seen on Lifetime. Hey, it’s not just a channel for women. Warren does exactly what we expect, first locking The Bride in a room with only a bed and then “explaining” to her what she will have to do to pay for room and meals.  

Yup, Warren is a nasty pimp-daddy. The Bride is forced to endure sleeping with him, an experience that paves the way to him prostituting her out to others. She has brief memory flashes of her prior life, but the nightmare of the here-and-now blots them out. All of that changes as Warren sends her out with an expensive client.

 

Driving an expensive sports car and dressing in a tie, We get to meet douchey yuppy dude. Douchey yuppie dude doesn’t get that The Bride is doing this against her will. He assumes she’s eager when she huddles near him during the drive. The cause is her repressed memories starting to flood back to her spurred on by images in store windows. Yuppie boy can’t buy a clue.

 

So when The Bride doesn’t respond to his sexual performance with wails of delight, he’s quite upset. Never mind that up to this point we the audience haven’t heard her utter a single syllable and have, in fact, come to the conclusion that she may be mute. Stud muffin of course just believes the sex isn’t rough enough and takes things up a notch.

It looks like she’s about to be a motionless guest at the local morgue yet again. But right before she passes out, her life flashes before her eyes. Or in the case of a girl made up of hunks from several different people all sewn together, several unrelated girl’s lives pass before her eyes. In one giant two page montage.

Heh! I don’t know where the artist got some of these pictures, but most of them crack me up. Like the bar-b-que in the upper left. The reason that’s included is because this guy is giving her the sausage. And the Asian woman on the middle right is thinking “Where did I park my f’ing car?” Meanwhile the lady with the baby lower left is trying to decide if it’s appropriate to breastfeed in public. Barbara Bush really hates J-Lo is the message the top middle-to-right figures give me. But it’s really all just a call for The Bride to wake up and do something to take control of her life. She’s been given a second chance. She should make something of it. And so she does, starting with pushing the john out the nearest window.

No weeping for him, he got what he deserved. As The Bride flees the scene, I suddenly became hopeful that this tale might have a happy ending. No such luck. The bride squanders her “get out of the grave free” card by nosediving off the dock into the river. Our last shot of her is her drowning while reaching up for a white light.

O’Malley came out with a second “Between the Cracks” comic the same year (2003). It was called Between the Cracks: All Miracles Have a Price and Comicspriceguide.com lists it at almost $16. I guess it was superior to this title, because there’s no miracle here. Let’s give The Bride her last rites and let all of her pieces rest in…uh, peace.

Comedy isn't Pretty, Part II: The Adventures of Rheumy Peepers and Chunky Highlights

Pfft!...If he knew REAL magic, he'd have made this comic disappear (seriously, I kid..)

I've been a fan of Penn Jillette for a long time now. It is pretty easy to see why, what with his Renaissance-man list of career choices and his modern day sensibilities, what's not to like. Well, okay for some of you maybe a lot. Jillette is an avowed outspoken atheist, which rubs some people raw, was co-producer/co-director of the awful The Aristocrats movie that was almost as bad as the joke itself, and he regularly exposes his negative views on pseudo-science and metaphysics in a way that is very difficult to refute.

Only the middle one of those three do I find upsetting.

As to the good, he has for years been the speaking part of the magical duo of Penn and Teller, an astonishing act with a style as offbeat as their tricks. He's made several popular television appearances on everything from Celebrity Apprentice to Babylon 5 to Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (and many others). Penn even added his levity and expertise to my very own career field when he became a contributor to PC/Computing magazine as a columnist of the back section, which I frequently turned to first.

So I have a lot of love for Mr. Jillette.

But this book of his with Eisner, Ignatz and Harvey Award nominated illustrator Renee French is pretty much worthless for anything but using  as a starter for my next backyard barbecue. I take little pleasure in saying that. When respected artists and performers get together, I love telling my audience tales of the awesome thing that only cost me a quarter in my latest bin diving.

But alas this time it is not to be the case. The two stories contained do not amuse. Granted they don't offend either, they mostly just bore. Which in this case is kind of unpardonable.

We begin with the secret identities of the titled Rheumy Peepers and Chunky Highlights playing poker with two musician buddies. Now before we get too involved, I'm going to dispel a few expectations: 1.) there are no superhero antics in this. 2.) there are three, count them, three jokes in the entire book: two on page two and one on page three. After that it is a joyless experience that makes you wish you were reading something else.

Anything else.

The back of the shampoo bottle, perhaps.

So let's at least give these two the benefit of making you crack a smile, even if it is a weak one at best. Here are our two heroes poking fun at their friends while cheating them out of their earnings by sharping them at cards.

Their friends are both trombone players.

So you see, That's the JOKE! Or two of them.

Then the trombone player says…

 

And that's the OTHER joke.

Then 30 pages later, the comic book ends.

Seriously. There is nothing more to see here. We, the audience spend an extraordinary amount of time on the characters, by which I mean drawing panels that do little to move the action along and in which character's interactions don't actually tell us anything. Something as simple as collecting the winnings becomes the montage of handing a box, characters looking at each other, touching the box, looking again at each other, taking money from the box and putting a wad of cash in their sock garter.

It's enough to make a Bendis book look frenetic and fast-paced in comparison. We don't need to show every interaction, every motion, every frame, especially when they do little to establish anything of note to the plot or to inform the audience about the characters. I'm reminded of many first stories by writers where they spend time establishing everything a character does or telling us in minute detail their exact height, weight, age and what they are wearing. Ed Greenwood's horrifically boring "Spellfire" springs to mind.

The key to this is simple: don't include it if it does nothing to advance the plot, develop the characters or describe the setting. And even if it marginally might do one of those things, do NOT bore the audience. Which this does.

Four panels…that could easily have been compressed into two…or one…or best of all, NONE.

So rest of this story is this: Each of these two men who have been cheated at cards later receives a large sum of cash from an anonymous donor. Note that the reason they were being scammed at cards was so Rheumy and Chunky could use the funds to further their crime fighting careers. Which we never see, by the way. So sometime later when the money comes rolling back in….

 

…as the audience, we have to ask: How do the absent duo dynamic suddenly have the scratch to pay off these people they've fleeced? Where does the money come from? How do you make money from being a superhero? You don't! That's the freaking point of doing something altruistic, you don't get PAID!

Yet this is really just the setup for this "joke."

This makes me mad at the time invested in reading the intervening pages. What's worse is there is a second story in the book featuring these characters and once it started to meander down this same track I immediately stopped reading it. Because I have better, more enjoyable things to do with my time than read bad comics that hold NO redeeming value.

What I'm saying is this: surprise me, shock me, make me hate you or love you or anything…any emotion at all. Just don't waste my time.

Which clearly The Adventures of Peepers and Highlights did. Oni released one of these and that was it…no follow ups and no number 2's.

Sadly, I expected more from Penn.