Animal Stories, all new from Top Shelf (IDW) consists of six surreal, overlapping tales. Or is it ‘tails’?
Writers and Illustrators Peter Hoey and Maria Hoey breed these stories, blending a flat, studied smooth line cartoon style with an elliptical, controlled voice. The voice of the animals and birds, the visual voice of the cartoonists, the line of direction as steady and as erratic as the crow flies. Or the pigeons.
Speaking of pigeons, one story is about a girl who keeps pigeons. When an additional pigeon suddenly appears and starts visiting her, carrying written notes, she becomes curious. Her investigation leads us, the reader, on an interlocking series of narratives that carry us across the street, across the sea, through the window of captivity, and on a quest for freedom of expression. This quest is biblical in dimension, global in proportions, local in flavour.
The stories, as ‘shaggy dog’ as they might be, and as repetitive and rhythmic in all-caps word balloons as they seem, are deceptive. We are misled and misfed, mistakenly assuming things that will be or not be unleashed. You gotta love strange stories that blend legends, biblical concepts, and humans with big big flaws.
The visuals are honed and polished, a mixture in style between ‘how to guide’ flat line diagrams to carefully coloured storybook fantasies. It’s all done within the lines.
Animal Stories is well-meant, well managed, and squirrely surreal, with attention to detail and an almost obsessive quality of mixed visual metaphors and dug-up surreal Eden-like flowerbeds.
IDW, Animal Stories, $19.99 for 180 pages
Newsdesk