James Tynion IV and Michael Avon Oeming work together on Blue Book #1, a new miniseries title from Dark Horse. It’s all about ordinary people encountering strange beings.
Blue Book, the story, is written by Tynion and illustrated by Oeming. We meet a middle-aged couple returning to New Hampshire from Montreal in 1961. Betty and Barney Hill have stopped at a roadside cafe for a break from night driving, the moon is up, and all is swell. Until Betty later starts seeing strange lights in the sky.
The second story, True Weird “Coney Island”, again written by Tynion, is illustrated by Klaus Janson. (lettering throughout by Aditya Bidikar). It takes place on Coney Island New York, in 1889. A man seeing a strange flying creature at the beach reminisces about other strange things that have occurred on Coney Island.
The two stories differ in flavour, style, and visual execution. Oeming makes use of large black-and-white simplified shapes. At times, this technique is effective, but at other times, the simplicity actually complicates things for the reader. Are both Betty and Barney both black, or not? The reason we care? Well, Is the cafe waitress frowning at them because she is racist, or because she didn’t get a tip? We puzzle on things that should be clarified. Is that a foot, or is it an arm?
Janson applies a clean, thin elegant line in his commercial-style renderings. The figures are interesting, the environments easy to understand. His use of ‘zipatone’, while likely done by computer in 2023, harkens back to the old days of comics and black-and-white comic strips. It seems appropriate to use in a story that takes place before our grandparents were born.
Where Blue Book doesn’t excite me is in Tynion’s decision to elongate certain scenes, and yet pull us back from suspense at the same time. We should be enthralled with these true, real accounts of real people experiencing inexplicable sightings. But we simply flip along through the pages, looking at the art, browsing from our armchairs. Let’s zip ahead to issue 2. and see how truly ‘Weird’ these tales get.
Dark Horse, Blue Book #1, $4.99 for 36 pages of content
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