Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Hobtown Mystery Stories Vol. 1: The Case of the Missing Men, from Oni Press.
by Arpad Okay. Hobtown is a strange, everyday small town. Uncanny, disturbing, and plain, a home to curses and secrets. Set on fire, buried in the woods, losing-your-fingernails secrets. The little wooden goblin on the side of the road is more than just a kitschy statue. And yet, some of Hobtown’s worst horrors are the absurdly normal slices of life. That time the gym teacher did boomer karaoke at the all-school assembly. The Alderman’s cryptic intensity. The mundane becomes grotesque as the mystery unravels, the restraint of normalcy causing ominous bulges and leakage at the seams, binding a much deeper darkness.
And yet, The Case of the Missing Men is Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown territory, and not just because of the throwback aesthetic (though it helps). Kris Bretin’s kids in the crime investigation club are, for all intents and purposes, adults in child bodies. They behave how teenagers picture themselves behaving. Like their forebears in the young detective pantheon, despite living at home and going to school, they have authority over themselves. Following the threads of a mystery instead of doing their homework or going to football practice.
The new kid is a super genius who wouldn’t even be at school if his father wasn’t one of the titular missing men, so there’s even an angle of the-kids-who-are-adults bumping heads (like children) over who is the most grown up. I find Bretin’s natural back and forth between ideals and experience really compelling; nobody I went to high school with was a successful private investigator, but jealous beefs I am familiar with. Real and unreal, The Case of the Missing Men is a liminal story whose dreaminess entrances and repulses in turn.
Can the gang help the new kid find his dad? The other men who are missing are better avoided than confronted. Ride your motorcycle out of foster care and into a deep reverie; those men will be the golden ones bearing your father’s mummified corpse on a throne of rods. Sometimes in Hobtown, the division between dreamt and real will be less clear. Alexander Forbes’ art style is broad enough that real and unreal don’t aesthetically intrude on one another. There’s a lot going on — a pulp story undercut with school-aged serial novel vibes that frequently lapse into the inexplicable or impossible. Red herrings and reversals of fate. Not only are all the individuals involved in the mystery really goddamn weird, so is everyone else in town.
The Case of the Missing Men is not the type of mystery where the reader has to put the puzzle together. Through twists and turns, it leads you through the labyrinth. The pieces it gives you touch on practically every approach mystery storytelling can take: told as witness interviews, shown as evidence and diagrams, hashed out in a brainstorming session, deduced through analysis, discovered while sleuthing. What if we’ve found what we’re looking for? she asks, placing the severed bird’s beak on top of a paper plate with a crayon drawing of a dog on it. The beak becomes a sad little grimace on the dog’s face, the edge red and raw from where the pheasant’s head exploded moments ago. This is the riddle to be solved: oblique, disarming, a surreal construction made from recognizable pieces in profane arrangement.
Jason Fischer-Kouhi’s coloring for the Oni edition is equally compelling, at times at odds with the art, frequently elevating it. Forbes definitely executed the original work as a black-and-white book. The colors, by and large, sit behind the art, which works with the busy and delicate linework. Watercolor textures compliment the crosshatching. The subdued wash suits the linographic elements in the art style. Fischer-Kouhi uses a palette that doesn’t evoke retro imagery directly, but autumn earth tones dominate it. The comic is the color of the pots, the trim of the stove, the wood-paneled walls in a late 70s kitchen — the flavor of disposable camera photographs.
The color palette and, to some degree, the subject matter recall pre-code crime and horror comics, but instead of the heavy inks and distinctly dated features that signify that period, Forbes’ style leans more toward MTV. The pretty girls and the melty, milky nightmare local yokels would’ve been right at home between The Brothers Grunt and The Head on Liquid Television. The 90s were the end of the murky film stock era, so the look of one decade with the older decade’s palpable presence feels oddly authentic.
When the kids notice something, however, the emanata around them let us know. Forbes draws a bunch of lines (that don’t technically exist) to convey how they feel, speaking to the reader in the language of comics. Fischer-Kouhi takes that moment and actually turns on the lightbulb. The “aha” causes the gang to be physically illuminated. On the one hand, it’s an argument that some comics weren’t made to be in color, and on the other, it’s proof that a talented colorist can make decisions that violate the established rules of the aesthetic but work because they work (just like the emanata).
For instance, Fischer-Kouhi took the drawings on the paper plate masks, once done in the same line that defined everything else in the book, and made them distinctly drawn on in crayon, a tremendously creepy success. Distinct, well-considered choices — or perhaps just doing what comes naturally. Either way, the Oni edition brings a new dimension to the story.
Forbes’ art is very cartoonist. Dotted lines shoot from the eyes. Fart blasts a kid off a bench like a Don Martin Mad gag. The blorbed-out Hobtown elders look less like people with skin and more like when too much batter is put in the pan, soft rolls of excess dough spilling out over each other and collapsing. A bunch of funny-looking residents, like the Alderman, the lady who owns the diner, and the gym teacher, all fall in a Mike Judge cartoon middle ground. Some heinous-looking individuals, population 2000.
Mostly, though, the town looks real and the countryside is pretty. The kind of illustrations you’d find in a junior detective novel or the booklet of a Wes Anderson DVD. The drawings aren’t trying to look dated. They could be a serial novel, sure, or they could be the art on a Crimpshrine 45 or an early Green Day EP. The two riders on the motorcycle, the high school kid who is secretly a spy with a zip gun and a suitcase camera-phone. A girl in a scarf thoughtfully smoking a pipe. That’s punk, right? Hobtown Mystery Stories is interested in being iconic but disrespectful towards honoring traditions.
Townsfolk sure seem to view the amateur detective club as a bunch of punks. And their traditions, secrets, and curses indicate (after a little investigation) that these men weren’t the first to go missing. It’s a surreal and singular work of ambitious reach. The Curse of the Missing Men is a real genre-buster, with something different to offer readers who like crime comics, horror fans, romance, slice of life, swashbuckling adventure, spy thrills, surreal dream stories, procedurals, all these things at once. The adventure of a lifetime, given to these kids to live out instead of dream up, just for being the only people in town who could be bothered to pay attention or care.
Hobtown Mystery Stories Vol. 1: The Case of the Missing Men is available to purchase. For ordering information, click this.
Oni Press / $24.99
Written by Kris Bertin.
Illustrated by Alexander Forbes.
Colors by Jason Fischer-Kouhi.
Lettered by Alexander Forbes.
Edited by Zack Soto and Bess Pallares.
Check out this 4-page preview of Hobtown Mystery Stories Vol. 1: The Case of the Missing Men, courtesy of Oni Press:
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