From the Archives- Beasts of Burden: Animal Rights

Here's one from August 2010, and it opens with a reminder of how old this probably is. The Beasts of Burden Compendium came out last year and was one of the best things I read, and it all started here with Beasts of Burden: Animal Rights. This review is presented here with just a few updates for clarity and corrections.

It’s an idea so simple that I’m sure it has to have been done before, but I’ve never seen it.

A haunted doghouse.

That’s how Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson begin Beasts of Burden: Animal Rights, a collection of short stories about the dogs and a neighborhood stray cat in the town of Burden Hill who have to deal with the kind of ghouls and monsters that would be more at home in one of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy stories than in a talking animal comic.   Their first story in this books is about these dogs trying to figure out why one of their friend’s doghouse is haunted.  It’s not like the dog’s are professional ghost hunters or anything; they’re just the neighborhood mutts, trying to help a frightened friend.  The haunted doghouse is only be beginning of the horrors to be found in Burden Hill.

If you are used to Dorkin as the smart-alec, self-effacing  and funny cartoonist of Dork! or Milk & Cheese, Beasts of Burden: Animal Rights firmly establishes him as more than just a sardonic writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture.  He gives each dog and the occasional cat a distinctive voice.  There’s the protective leader of the group, the scaredy cat (but not the real cat) of the group, the trusting friend, the adventurer and the cat, the outsider who just wants to run with the dogs.  With this cast of characters, he creates a warmth to the book as they know quite obviously that they’re in over their heads but they keep on going up against these other creatures and monsters because it’s their instinct to protect.

Dorkin strikes a nice medium, planting his stories somewhere between Hellboy and Scooby Doo.  Like Mignola did in the early days of Hellboy, Dorkin is building a world where the supernatural is very real.  It’s a world with werewolves, frog monsters, witches and covens, ghosts and old, ancient wise dogs exist while his main characters are simple suburban household pets.  Mignola’s Hellboy has to travel around the world to find beasts and horrors but Dorkin’s dogs find them in our backyards or in the woods just down at the end of the block.  The normal, suburban setting makes Dorkin’s monsters more real and threatening than Mignola’s.  Have you looked inside your dog’s house today to see who or what is in there?

Of course, it’s easy for the threats to seem more real when Jill Thompson is painting them.  More and more, I become convinced that Thompson can draw and paint just about everything.  Her animals are so full of life and character in this book.  The greatest compliment to pay her I think is to simply say that I could see any of my own dogs being characters in this book.  Between the five main dogs and one cat, she captures just the individual personalities that dogs can have.  Without over-exaggerating or becoming too cartoony, her dogs are real dogs.  She knows how to show us the different breeds, their expressions and even their mannerisms perfectly on the page.  Similarly to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s WE3, which also featured a team of animals, Evan Dorkin’s Beasts of Burden stories comes together so well because the artist knows how to draw animals and make them look like real animals, not some overly cartoonish simplification of what they think a dog or a cat should look like.

More than just drawing the neighborhood dogs and strays, Thompson also perfectly captures the horrors that they have to face.  She brings the ghosts, zombie dogs, witches and rains of frogs that Dorkin writes to life, making them as real as the normal dogs and cats.  Much like I never thought of Dorkin as a horror writer, I don’t know if I ever really thought of Thompson as a horror artist; she draws the cute witch stories, not the really scary ones.  With the vividness of colors she achieves by painting this book, she’s able to push the mood of this book, creating both a well-lit and safe world and a dark, shadowy world of giant frogs and ghost dogs.  There’s one page in this book that’s basically out of The Walking Dead, only with dogs.  It’s creepy, horrible and fantastic and I think only Jill Thompson could have pulled it off.

In the afterword, Dorkin explains a bit about how Beasts of Burden is a bit of a happy accident.  Asked to contribute a story to a Dark Horse anthology, Evan Dorkin wrote a story about a haunted dog house and got lucky enough that Jill Thompson drew the story.  It was not meant to be a continuing story; he wrote it as a one shot.  Then he was asked to write another story featuring these animals for another anthology.  And then stories in another anthology or two came along and eventually a miniseries, all of which are collected in this book.  Whether you want to call it an animal story or a horror story, Beasts of Burden: Animal Rights is great work by two talented creators who are obviously having fun with their story.