Starring Evelyn Gurlimann, this comic—a blend of horror, farce,
fairytale and superheroism—is divided into six short, loosely connected
episodes, each one darkly mind-bending. The hero/ine, a wo/man of shifting and/or
undefined gender/sexuality, more often than not resembles Charlie Chaplin with
a thin pencil moustache and a wild ‘W’ of hair in place of a bowler hat. “His
very presence heralds imminent disaster!” the opening page warns. Sure enough,
in subsequent pages Gurlimann (accidently?) induces one man’s head to explode,
another’s chin to sprout a pair of violently-kicking baby legs, etc. It’s
horrifically absurd, absurdly horrific. And it’s thought-provoking stuff. “Making
No Magnifisense” asks what happens when archetypal masculine heroism, in the
form of meteor-shattering Magnificent Man, is confronted with the enigma of Gurlimann. “Oh, Emgee,” is a two-line dialogue about the (non)existence
of God. As the episode titles suggest, Dimes loves to play with words, and the
text is just as precise as the illustrations. “Something Peculiar,” a rhyming
verse about Gurlimann’s stroll through Rottingwood Roads, a place littered with
stiffened squirrel corpses, reminded me of Edward Gorey. Often, the lifespan of
comics is short: read once, recycle. But after reading this, I flipped right
back to the beginning and started again…
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