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Ojo
The story is not uncovering new territory for Kieth
(it’s hard not to be reminded of the dead rabbit in
the early issues of The Maxx) but that soon
becomes unimportant when you find out how Kieth really
nails this story. Annie is a young girl, living with
her grandfather and sister while trying to get over
the fact that her mother recently passed away. Death
and how we living people deal with it is the strong
theme of the book, something realized when Annie lets
us know, early on in the book, that she is responsible
for the death of three animals. Two of them were pets
that she tried ever so hard to take care of but
instead rather clumsily contributed to their demise.
The third is a bug she stepped whose death she deiced
needed as much a memorable service as the two pets, so
now we have three rocks in Grandpa’s garden with the
names of three animals on them. Annie is not even a
pre-teen and she’s got her own funeral service going.
Her chance to be a truly responsible pet owner comes
by when she finds this weird little squid-like monster
who she names Ojo. Annie finds out that to feed Baby
Ojo she has to feed Mother Ojo, who lives in the big
sewer pipe not far from the house. From there we get a
creepy and interesting story of Annie thinking that
the Mother Ojo is a reincarnation of her mother,
Annie’s rather exceptional way of trying to get
through losing her mother.
The most striking part of the book is how Kieth,
Pardee and Wisnia jump around in art styles while
telling this story. Annie’s grandfather is an artist
and Annie partakes in a few child-like drawings
herself. A lot of the art in the book in fact looks
like Annie drew it herself, which compliments the
first-person narration. In just a few pages the art
can go from a bold-lined animated style to a sketchy
horror style to something resembling Charles Schultz’
work. It’s amazing that Kieth has the storytelling
chops so that the reader never gets lost reading this
book. Instead, the book strikes a consistent tone
throughout, a brilliantly off-kilter one that stays
with the readers after they put the book down, because
of the employ of so many different looks. There are
some thoroughly impressive pages like when Annie’s
three dead friends sing a song to her from beyond the
grave during bath time in Chapter 2. The
transformation of spiraling bath water into this
psychedelic scenery makes the artwork almost seem too
big for the page.
All these artistic ideas Kieth and his collaborators
employ only make the story of Annie’s feelings about
death stronger. The look of the book never stays on
one style too long matches how Annie is growing up,
getting al lthese different idea in her head about
life and death. She is seeing lives end around her all
the time while she is just starting life. Kieth
captures the real horror of being a child so starkly
realistically. The tormenting older sister isn’t some
type of comic relief but instead feels like a real
menace that can cause some major damage on an already
wounded psyche. The imagination Annie has about her
pet Ojo is glued right next to the desperation her and
her family’s life have. Reading the book you can get
the feeling that there really isn’t any world outside
of Annie’s mind, which is probably why she chooses to
live in it so much. That imagination of Annie’s feels
cracked so much because of the desperation and pain
she’s been through. The only quibble I have is that I
wish there wasn’t a part where one character actually
outright tells another that all these delusions Annie
has about the Ojos is her way of dealing with her
Mom’s death (and her feelings of guilt about it). It’s
only a page but still, nobody needs a page where the
book says “alight, here’s what we’re trying to get
at.” I mean if more books do that, what are we
intellectually posing critics, who like to dwell on
books’ themes as if we actually know something, meant
to do?
Ojo looks and feels like no other comic book
out right now (with the exception of the other Sam
Kieth comics kept in print, and even then this is a
step forward from those works). It’s hard to tell
where the look of the book begins and the story behind
it ends. Shouldn’t that be how a good comic book
always is, though?
-- Ian Brill
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It seems fitting that Kieth would release the first of
what is a planned line of comic book mini-series under
the banner of Oni Press. Oni has always catered to the
reader who wants a comic book reading experiencing
that isn’t quite DC or Marvel mainstream but not the
form-challenging work one would find from a company
like Drawn & Quarterly. Kieth himself is an artist who
falls in between those lines. His The Maxx
series was the first comic of real artistic merit to
come from Image comics during the early ‘90s. Kieth
had found some success as a penciller for titles like
Sandman and Marvel Comics Presents but
it would be with this creator-owned series that Kieth
would showcase to an audience his unique way of mixing
realism and fantasy in comics as well as his knack for
writing stand out female characters. Ojo is a
fine addition to Kieth’s oeuvre and also a wonderfully
weird story in itself.