Taking the Train to MuZz

By Joe Hilliard

Slave Labor Graphics has long been the home of the outré when it comes to the comic book world. Their books are both entertaining and grotesque, books like Gloomcookie, Lenore, and highly enjoyable. Their new collection, MuZz by writer and artist FSc, with its foray into a Byzantine dreamworld, is no exception.

I first saw FSc's art when she worked on Serena Valentino's Nightmares and Fairytales a few years ago. While her art is similar, she has really taken a major step forward here. With MuZz, there is a scratchy feel to her pencils, like writing on the wall, the writing of a madman locked in a cell, scrabbling to be heard. Characters rip and scratch. They melt, they fade out. It's an amazingly drawn book. The surreal fades into the grotesque, the grotesque into the sublime. It's Alice in Wonderland mixed by Dali and thrown into FSc's own unique blender. The haunted eyes of the characters permeate every page, staring back at us as we stare at them. It's the gaping hole where our heroine's eye is missing. It's the look on everyone's face. They live in a dreamworld, and are haunted by nightmares. Nightmares within nightmares.

The story is far-ranging. We are introduced to Farllee, a girl with no memory, no eye, riding on a train full of strange creatures, on their way to MuZz. But that melts away into a world of doppelgangers, of doubles and triples, of reflections of a reflection. A world of hidden pasts and a multi-layered dreamworld akin to Dante's levels of Hell. There is Farllee's underlying quest to discover her past, but that is merely the frame that FSc hangs her broader canvas on. As we follow the fractured Farllee (both literally and metaphorically) on her journey, we traverse regret, suffering, familial pain that make up so much more of her journey than any simple remembrance. We are subsumed by the pain of those trapped in the dreamworld.

Be warned, MuZz is not an easy, quick read. The art is dense. The writing is dense. I found myself re-reading sections looking for deeper understanding. I found myself staring into the corners of the panels to decipher the lines. It's challenging. It's frustrating. It will make you a bit paranoid. But, it is also worth that effort it takes. FSc has delivered a strange, frightening world populated with fascinatingly flawed people. People I would gladly spend time with again. Check it out.

FSc's website is: http://fscwasteland.com/. Slave Labor Graphics' website is: http://www.slgcomic.com/. The first volume of MuZz is available now with a cover price of $14.95.

Next time, we'll take a look at the graphic novel Vendor by Kevin Abrams, Adam Moore and Nicc Balce.

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