Comics we love: Beasts of Burden

Apple pie and ice cream, beer and Bavarian pretzels, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby: They go together.

Similarly, comic books and Halloween seem made for each other—and not just because they provide dozens of iconic costume choices. As evidenced by an annual variety of special All Hallow’s Eve issues, creators love to tell spooky tales, often mashing up genres in imaginative ways that comics do especially well. (Comics Should Be Good’s clever Halloween-oriented take on an advent calendar provides plenty of examples.)

This year brings a bumper crop. In the “most talked about” category,” Image Comics’ hit series The Walking Dead (you can read the first issue free here) gets a much-buzzed-about cable TV adaptation, debuting (natch) on Sunday 31 (AMC, 9pm). But if you’re feeling Halloweenie yet aren’t up for plunging into a long-form zombie epic, the best bang for your sequential-art buck this year is clearly Beasts of Burden/Hellboy (Dark Horse, $3.50; preview for free here), on sale in comic shops this week. This stand-alone tale tweaks a classic comic-book trope—the superhero team-up—with refreshingly oddball results, uniting the kickass demon hero Hellboy with a team of dogs and cats who protect their small town from supernatural threats.

A sleeper hit from Dark Horse that’s gaining more fans every year, Beasts is the brainchild of writer Evan Dorkin and artist Jill Thompson. A trippy Lassie/Twin Peaks mashup, Dorkin’s dark tales make excellent use of Thompson’s mad painting skills, depicting a world where the animals (who can talk to each other, but not to their humans) must sneak out of their homes to ward off the evil perpetually gnawing at the edges of this seemingly idyllic town. (She talked to us about it earlier this month, as well as discussing her whimsical Scary Godmother stories, now collected in one handsome hardcover from Dark Horse (192 pages, $25).)

A native Chicagoan, Thompson’s history with Dorkin goes back about 18 years, when they established a quick bond as animal lovers. Dorkin was traveling home to New York from a comics convention with another pro (Robbie Busch, who, like Thompson, also worked on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman). The pair crashed at Thompson’s house, where “Evan said he didn’t get any sleep, because my cat Archie was at his feet,” Thompson recalls. “Evan was afraid to move because Archie was a kitten at the time, and he didn’t want to disturb the kitten. He’s a sweetie like that.” It’s a wistful memory for Thompson, whose Archie died this past December at age 19.

Most comic books don't move people to tears, but Thompson’s heard that feedback repeatedly about Beasts of Burden. (She admits that one of Dorkin’s scripts made her cry too, even as she painted it.) “I don’t set out to manipulate somebody’s emotions,” she says. “But if I’m telling a story that has this amazingly poignant part, I want the build-up to get you to that point of relief or tears or happiness or what-have-you. That’s my job as a story teller.”