My favorite book growing up was Deborah and James Howe's Bunnicula, a story of domesticated occult detectives Harold (a dog), Chester (a cat) and the alleged vampire rabbit who disrupts their happy home one dark and stormy night. There's just something about the dynamic of a fearless canine sniffing out supernatural crimes that really sings, and it's a subgenre that Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson have truly embraced more than a few times for their Beasts of Burden stories. Originally appearing in Dark Horse anthologies including The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings, the Beasts of Burden comics are beautifully illustrated shorts about a team of dogs and one cat from sleepy Burden Hill, and their investigations into the paranormal. This past year has also seen the debut of a 4-part mini, hopefully the first of many in the Dark Horse style. DH has collected that story as well as all the previous Beast of Burden shorts in a new hardcover collection, out this week.
Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the painterly style of Jill Thompson and Evan Dorkin's surprisingly sinister scripts, this is a great way to dig in.
Dark Horse was nice enough to pass along this eight page preview which contains a complete Beasts of Burden tale (originally printed in The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings):
Format: FC, 184 pages, Hardcover, 7 3/4" x 11"
Price: $19.99
Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites hits the shops this week.
Find us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Some rights reserved.
This was a great mini that’ll hopefully continue. The art is beautiful and the animals are adorable. Which makes the creepy things that happen to them even more disturbing. I forget which issue it was where the last page of the dog and her puppies still haunts me to this day.
SQUIRREL!!
So buying this!
Beautiful! @NawidA speaks for me, too.
this series was a perfect example of Horror story telling in its purest form.
The presentation looks excellent with this HC and I will be tempted to ‘double-dip’
I would buy this for my kids, but I think it is just too creepy for their age. Maybe I’ll get it for their mom instead.
Way too creepy for kids.
http://www.tradereadingorder.com/blog/review-beasts-of-burden-animal-rites/