Written By: Steve Niles
Art By: Alison Sampson
Published By: Image
Let’s just get this out of the way: Winnebago Graveyard is an awesome title for a story. It sounds like a cheesy horror movie with actual scares to it, so you and your friends put it on hoping for some laughs and then spend the rest of the night shivering and awake while checking the closet for monsters. It’s a cult classic with a guy in a suit, but it’s framed so well that it works.
I mean, the comic isn’t that at all, but the title is just really good.
Let’s ignore the plot and characters for a second and talk about the artwork here, because it’s the lining and colors that hurt this production. At first I loved them—the opening pages are amazing in terms of lights and shadows, and the geography and vehicles all look really nice. It’s gritty and distorted, but it’s nice.
And then we see people. They are ugly.
I look at something like Extremity, which has very unpleasant artwork, and go, “Yeah this works for the story it’s trying to tell. I like that it’s purposefully ugly.” With Winnebago Graveyard, I just don’t want to look at it. The people and their faces are all vulgar in a bad way, not adding to the story or the setting but looking…well, wrong. I don’t think some of the proportions are right, but that might be the least of their worries.
They don’t always match the writing. There’s a page where a kid is looking at his phone and says, “That sounds fun!’ At first I thought it was sarcasm because he looks so damned indifferent, but then the next panel he’s going, “I hope they have a rollercoaster,” like he’s actually excited. This isn’t a problem that plagues the entire comic, but it crops up enough to mar the experience.
As to the actual plot, there’s a cult in the beginning and a bickering family for the rest of it. They’re visiting a carnival and trying to enjoy a vacation together. To the comic’s credit, the book handles the characters pretty well, even if the beginning cult is a bit too strange/edgy for its own good. Humans are the vessels of evil? You don’t say!
And to the book’s credit, it relies heavily on the artwork to tell its story without heaps of exposition and overwriting. There’s not much talking as the family navigate this strange carnival, and when the creepshow starts to…well, show, it works on a narrative level.
But man the art is bad.
I feel like I have to reiterate that I don’t mind strange or “bad” artwork. I adore Underwinter which is as distorted and surreal as you can get while still being coherent, and I do like Extremity. That book works well with its style. But at a certain point, distorted and vulgar stop working, and that’s this book. It’s unpleasant to look at. This makes it unpleasant to read.
