You could call it comedy and tragedy. You could call it good cop, bad cop. You could call it the carrot and the stick. Whatever you call it, this double-barreled approach to storytelling is working sickeningly well for Monsters. Directed with verve by Paris Barclay from a script by co-creator Ian Brennan and David McMillan, this tremendous episode features some of the show’s funniest material yet, including an anxiety-spiking musical montage, a Zoolander-ish escape fantasy sequence, and a camp confrontation between a brassy broad and a blue blood in high dudgeon. And — here’s the real, real rough stuff, so be warned — it also explains that when you’re being molested, you can spike your abuser’s food with cinnamon to improve the taste of his ejaculate. You see what I’m saying? It lifts you up, and then knocks you to the concrete.

I reviewed the third episode of Monsters for Decider.

Are we obligated to be grateful to our parents for all they have given us, even as we suffer from everything else they have given us?

I reviewed the second episode of Monsters for Decider.

Monsters has two chief weapons in its arsenal. The first is its suite of actors — Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny as the terrifying José and Kitty, Dallas Roberts as the nebbishy Dr. Oziel, Nicholas Alexander Chavez as the manic and obviously badly damaged Lyle, and especially Cooper Koch as Erik. Koch spends the entire episode on what feels like the verge not just of tears, but a full-fledged nervous breakdown. He holds his face drum taut, his eyes gush water seemingly involuntarily, he trembles as he talks, when he finally gets his confession out it comes in one quick gasp that compresses the words together. It’s his role to offset the American psychoness of Chavez’s Lyle — to be their bleeding heart, even as Lyle’s scheming mind whisks them from one failed attempt at creating an alibi to the next. Koch has to present us with the other side of the brothers; that’s a vital job, and he nails it.

Monsters’ other weapon is a familiar one in Murphy’s arsenal: excess. In the American Crime Story and Monster/s anthologies — all five seasons of which have focused on crimes that communicate some core, dark American values amid a 1990s media circus — he seems to have found the balance that has largely eluded him elsewhere, judiciously deploying moments of camp (Lyle making them play “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” in his mother’s honor at the memorial service; the homoeroticism of the brothers’ relationship) and horror-violence (the hideous massacre of the parents, each of whom took multiple shots, and in Kitty’s case multiple minutes, before dying; Erik’s harrowing dreams of suicide, puling the trigger in which is the only way he can actually sleep) instead of just slathering them all across the screen. 

I reviewed the debut of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s new true-crime drama Monsters for Decider.

Monster
Paul Lyons, Jim Drain, Michael DeForge, Michaela Zacchilli, Brian Ralph, Chuck Forsman, James Kochalka, Jim Rugg, Peter Edwards, Andy Estep, Oscar Estep, CF, Brian Chippendale, Blade, Keith McCulloch, Mike Taylor, Roby Newton, Edie Fake, Leif Goldberg, Keith Jones, Dennis Franklin, Jo Dery, Erik Talley, Beatrice McGeoch, Tony Astone, Mat Brinkman, Nick Thorburn, Melissa Mendes, Aaron DeMuth, writers/artists
Paul Lyons, editor
self-published (I think), October 2010
88 pages
$20
Buy it from PictureBox

They’re gettin’ the band back together, man! From out of the rubble of Fort Thunder rises the surprise 2010 revival of the gigantically influential Providence underground-art institution’s house anthology, featuring mostly-about-monsters work from all six of the Fort’s core cartoonists — Brinkman, Chippendale, Ralph, Drain, Lyons, Goldberg. Plus Andy Estep, Peter Edwards, Roby Newton, and a lot of other people you’ll see listed as having lived/worked/played in the Fort. Plus fellow-travelers like Providence’s CF and Jo Derry and Highwater’s James Kochalka. Plus Jim Rugg and Michael DeForge and Chuck Forsman and other leading lights of post-Fort alternative comics. And a reunion tour is exactly what it feels like.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s fine comics in this beautifully printed navy-blue-and-white package, many of which take advantage of its unusually large trim size. (We’re not talking Kramers Ergot 7 territory, but the thing is big. Think the Wednesday Comics hardcover.) Brian Ralph uses his comparatively clean cartoony style for a hilariously violent giant-robot comic, “Voltron from Hell,” basically, with huge panels and splash pages taking perversely pretty delight in mass destruction and death. The final panel of CF’s weird tale about an ambulance driver-cum-cat burglar who sneaks into the house of a woman with a mysterious disease actually made me jump — just a beautifully done little scare. Brian Chippendale’s story ties in with his Puke Force webcomic and gives him a chance to draw some villains at full splash-page size. I thought Chuck Forsman cut himself off at the knees a bit with his punchline ending, but until then his contribution was a creepy little thing that reminded me favorably of the urban legend my Delawarean wife recounted to me about the zoobies, the inbred mutant children of the DuPont family who would roam around the woods waylaying passers-by. There are insanely METAL full-page illustrations from Brinkman (who’s by now made a wonderful career of such things), Tony Astone, and Dennis Franklin — I mean, I laughed out loud at how fuckin’ devil-horns they were. And Lyons’s wraparound cover portraits of various barfing beasts is breathtaking, one of the most impressive single comics images of the year.

But in a way, the Fort Thunder aesthetic is a victim of its own success. I lost track of the number of good-to-great comics that came out this year bearing its influence, and those apples-to-apples comparisons make it hard for the work here, which I think all parties involved would admit was done more for fun than for tear-down-the-walls boundary-pushing, to stand out. In terms of anthologies alone, you could stand this one right between Studygroup 12, Closed Caption Comics, Smoke Signals, Diamond Comics, and Mould Map. Fort Thunder and the Providence scene’s DNA is now deeply embedded in an array publishers, including not just the late and lamented Highwater, Bodega, and Buenaventura, but also PictureBox, Secret Acres, Koyama, Nobrow, Pigeon, Gaze, and even the mighty Drawn & Quarterly. Moreover, whether you call it fusion or New Action or simply slap an alt- prefix in front of horror or SF or fantasy, Fort Thunder’s pioneering jailbreak of genre from the mainstream American comics prison has subsequently allowed it to become almost inescapable in smart-comics circles. Finally, Chippendale, Brinkman, Forsman, DeForge, CF, Fake, and Rugg are all in direct competition with work they put out elsewhere last year, most of which was more ambitious. And understandably so! Seriously, I’m not complaining — Monster is what I think it set out to be. It’s seeing Floyd get together for an awesome Live 8 gig, rather than seeing Waters and Gilmour working together again, and as such it’s more a treat for the fans than documentary evidence of why we became fans in the first place.