KILL ME AND OTHER CURIOSITIES / Scripts by CHAD LAMBERT / Art by TOM WILLIAMS, CHRISTINE LARSEN, K. CZAP & APRI KUBIANTORD / Letters by TOM WILLIAMS, JAYMES REED & K. CZAP / Cover Art by KELLY WILLIAMS / Published by DARK HORSE COMICS
Kill Me and Other Curiosities is not the sort of graphic novel I am often asked to review. While I’m not a total indie snob, I will freely admit that my pull list has more capes and tights than horror and sci-fi. Yet I’m not the sort of reader who thinks comics begin and end with superheroes either.
I mention this because Kill Me and Other Curiosities is hard to define in terms of genre. Indeed, one of the two common links between the stories in this anthology is that they were all written by Chad Lambert. The other is that they are all semi-autobiographical, except for the parts involving time travel and killing chronal doppelgangers. Or so he claims.
The first three stories in this volume center around a single character, Jack Garrett, at different points in his life. In “Now and Then,” a teenage Jack accidentally time-travels while listening to music. “Kill Me” finds a middle-aged Jack managing the same trick while contemplating suicide in a theme park. Ironically, this leads to him encountering multiple versions of himself, who he must kill in order to avert a paradox. Finally, there is “Yesterday’s Muse,” in which an elder Jack, now a successful writer, ponders the dream woman whose appearance seemed to inspire his success.
The second section of the book, Other Curiosities, collects four stories inspired by Chad Lambert’s days as a radio personality. “Dead Air” explains how Chad got into the radio business, partly inspired by WKRP in Cincinnati. “Radio Ga Ga” details how Chad became investigated by the Secret Service. “The Jock” reveals how Chad embarrassed himself with a fill-in sports talk gig. The final tale, “Breaking Out,” involves how Chad got out of the radio business and into radio marketing – an action he realized too late was a mistake.
I appreciate Lambert’s self-deprecating humorl both in the stories and in his commentary on the stories. You have to be able to laugh at yourself when you win the Harvey for “Promising New Talent” at age 46, for the sequel to a story you wrote when you were 20. These are funny stories, if darkly comic. Yet there is also a lot of depth and pathos. (Do I need to spell out the metaphorical implications of a man delaying suicide to murder his variants?)
The artwork is varied, but with consistent quality and an aesthetic always appropriate to the tale at hand. Lambert claims to be a man who “occasionally writes good comics and convinces far more talented people to illustrate them.” I will dispute the idea that he is not talented, but will agree that all the artwork in this volume is fantastic, as evidenced by the pages above and below.
Bottom Line? I enjoyed Kill Me and Other Curiosities immensely. I think it will appeal to anyone with a twisted sense of humor or fans of comedy sci-fi and weird, existential horror.
Kill Me and Other Curiosities arrives in book stores on December 3, 2024.
