DEAR CREATURE Jonathan Case
INNER SANCTUM Ernie Colon
and Frazer Irving
John Rozum XOMBI
SHOWCASE PRESENTS: GHOSTS VOLUME 1 Various
Chris Ryall and Nelson Daniel
ROAD RAGE #1 OF 4 Stephen King, Joe Hill,
ARMY OF DARKNESS #1 Elliott R. Serrano and Marat Mychaels
W
illiam Shakespeare isn’t the first name that comes to mind when thoughts turn to hor- ror. There is, nevertheless, much in the Bard’s work that modern genre writers can
look to for inspiration, whether it’s tormented ghosts and apparitions, heaping bouts of mad- ness, doomed romances or copious amounts of bloodshed. Dear Creature, a new graphic novel written and
illustrated by Jonathan Case and available now from TOR Books, takes its cue from the Bard – with a smattering of horror conventions – to pro- duce a unique and fascinating tale that manages to be epic, funny, romantic, dramatic, disturbing, horrific, tragic and uplifting. In a word, Shake- spearean. “I grew up going to Shakespeare plays as a kid,
and trained as an actor in college,” says Case. “I was always interested in performance, and the- atrical storytelling, but I also loved drawing. In my early twenties, I wrote and staged a play on the beach that served as the genesis of Dear Crea- ture. Afterwards, on a lark, I drew a mini-comic spinoff, and that sort of got me thinking about comics as a way to fuse my storytelling interests – writing, performance and drawing.” Case took his love of Shakespeare and com-
bined it with his childhood crush on monsters (“I had a special affection for tragic, ugly, egocentric beasties”), ultimately pro- ducing Dear Creature. It’s the story of Grue, a reptil- ian gill-man with a pen- chant for speaking in iambic pentameter and eating horny teenagers. Grue is filled with remorse at his actions and takes solace in the torn pages of Shakespeare’s works he mysteriously finds in- side empty bottles of Kiki Cola. Determined to stop eating people, he desper- ately searches for the person responsible for the castaway messages. This eventually leads him to Giulietta, a middle- aged agoraphobe who’s barricaded herself away from the world inside a cabin on her sister’s boat.
RM46
The two star-crossed lovers quickly
connect, but like Romeo and Juliet, obstacles soon present themselves. Giulietta’s nephew is being blamed for the teenage disappearances. Can Grue own up to his past before the law catches up to him and Giulietta, or is their new-found love doomed? Case has filled his story with many
Shakespearean elements: a hero haunted by his past, grim portents, mistaken identities, jesters, forces of nature, madness and self-imposed exile. However, lest ye non-Shake- speare fans fret, Case merely uses these as a springboard to tell a broader tale that encapsulates a wide range of familiar B-horror movie ele- ments. Along with promiscuous teens,
there’s the misunderstood creature, a mad scientist with requisite labora- tory, a damsel in distress, an angry mob of villagers, a gypsy woman and a giant squid. “I wanted to take those classic
monster and B-movie tropes and fuse them with some highbrow influences: theatre, idealized ro- mance, art house flicks from the ’60s,” explains Case. “Things you get beat up for liking.” He also believes Shakespeare and
Dear Creature: A monster mash-up of B-movies and the Bard. “I started the story with his ‘monstery’ moment
horror movies have another thing in common: the ability to mesh a num- ber of different elements success- fully into one story, allowing romance and comedy to comfortably exist alongside horror and tragedy. It’s a challenging balance but Dear Crea- ture pulls it off with style, primarily because the story’s focus remains firmly on Grue. Like many Shakespearean heroes, Grue is deeply flawed, yet the
reader’s sympathies remain with him throughout the story. Was this a challenge for the author, con- sidering that the protagonist is, after all, a man- eating monster?
of clarity,” says Case. “Sort of where he realizes he can’t go on with this flowery, idealistic brain and his animalistic behaviour winning out every time. I hoped that would keep him relatable as a character, with an edge of danger: when is he going to slip up and eat someone? I tried to play a lot of it for laughs, too. Readers expect the irre- sponsible teenagers to get it, so it’s fun to play with those expectations and expand upon why that’s true for every monster story. Since Grue isn’t human, you can’t really fault him for wanting to eat humans. That’s really what I love in monster stories. Monsters are just relatable enough to make you sad for their plight, and strange enough to make their human-eating seem natural. Enjoy- able, even!”
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