About Heroes

Writer: Evan Dorkin
Artist: Jill Thompson
Letterer: Jason Arthur

Recently Dark Horse released Beasts of Burden a comic series essentially about a bunch of dogs and cats fighting the supernatural.

I wanted to give this series a fair shake people I really really did but, the phrase "talking dogs & cats" is pretty much an automatic trigger for me to go into cynic mood. Memories of those horrible Look Whose Talking movies are brought up and it sours me a lot towards finding anything positive in anything.

Talking dogs and cats don't work. Point period. They don't work because nine times outta ten whoever is writing the characters doesn't understand the concept of decent characterization. Tell me how many times the dog or cat is written as a lovable, trustworthy animal. Yeah...almost always. Dogs/cats characterized with a "Oh golly" personality are boring, they are unrelateable. I am not saying we should sacrifice an entire story for the sake of good characterization but without decent writing giving voice to the characters, the writer is making the reader work harder to get into a story, and I think that's the problem with this title.

Evan Dorkin's writing is good, you can see glimmers of it here and there, but the characterization of the dogs/cats is just felt to be lacking. The artwork for the issue has a very fairy-tale feel to it which I dig. Jill Thompson's work on the huge frog, utterly disgusting but in a good way. Rare are the times a comic's art can gross me out but there is one scene in this issue where the frog explodes, aww man, seriously, it's pretty sick.

So in short, this first issue of Beasts of Burden is off to a ROCKY start. The writing right now is meh but the artwork by Thompson is promising.

C-