This comic is the best of Daniel Clewes, John Waters, and Highlights magazine. It combines camp and kitsch with a fuck-you attitude, the real kind of fuck-you attitude, not the kind you could buy at the Hot Topic in the mall in 2002. It is, at its core, what a locally created comic should be. Created by J. Kelly and John G., out of Cleveland, Ohio, the stories are a lovechild of Strangers in Paradise and Creature from the Black Lagoon, plopped unceremoniously into the biggest busiest city of that, er, sophisticated and metropolitan state (heh heh).
WRITTEN BY: Jake Kelly & John G.
ART BY: Jake Kelly & John G.
PUBLISHER: Shiner Comics
PRICE: $5.00
Reviewed by: Katy Rex
The writing is the easy conversational dialogue that we’ve come to be familiar with in works like Love & Rockets, and as campy and cheesy as the plot can get, the realistic characters and their natural-feeling conversations keep the boo, as a whole grounded enough to keep the reader engaged. Because of the ease in which one can sink comfortably into the page with barely a bloop as one is absorbed, the predictable horror tropes aren’t even remotely jarring or boring. “Camp” is a trend in comics, and maybe it always has been (does that still make it a trend?), but there’s a huge difference between a campy story and some bullshit attention-grabber in a feather boa and fedora winking obnoxiously at the audience. This comic? Not bullshit.
The art, in full-color glossy (a luxurious printing option in the world of indie comics, but extremely well executed in this case), straddles the realistic and the grotesque. It nods, at points, to the gritty spattered aesthetic so popular in the 90’s, the bright mod look of the 60’s and 70’s, and the cheesy B movie horror thing. The images seem thicker, more textured, than the more traditional inks. Each panel is drawn with care, no lazy half-finished faces or hands/feet hidden behind set pieces, and the characters are consistently both easily distinguishable and easy to read, expression-wise. The character design, in fact, matches perfectly with the characters as they are written: realistic, mundane, but somehow appealing.
This is a fantastically fun-to-read comic, and the cherry on top? I don’t know, I guess this banana split has 2 cherries. The first is the letters column. Written by the Commodore, a sort of mascot, muse, and Tales From The Crypt-style host, the letters column gives absolutely no shits about the fans who write in. In fact, in the second issue, the Commodore printed AND THEN REFUSED TO ANSWER several letters that were not properly addressed to him in the opening. The writer who did remember to write to the Commodore had her question generally dismissed, since he did not appreciate her writing “in an attempt to trick me into writing your term papers for you, Ms. Wooley.”
The second cherry– or, I don’t know, let’s call this one a lychee berry. For variety. The lychee berry next to the letters column cherry is, bizarrely, the ads. It’s unclear whether the ads are designed entirely from start to finish by John G. and J. Kelly, but they’re certainly part of the book. They’re cartoon-styled, occasionally with panels, and always with a sense of humor that makes it perfectly clear that the business would not have ad space with the Shiner Comics Group if they didn’t deserve it. Genuinely, the record store and restaurant ads have made me want to move to Cleveland, or (when I’m rich and famous) at least buy a vacation home there.
And in particular the advertisements for the LCS, Comics Are A Go, are self-aware and hilarious, poking fun at us, the nerds, while celebrating the painful elitism, insecurities, and immaturities that we have learned to mostly hate and/or embrace as a subculture.
At $5 a pop, The Lake Erie Monster is a traditionally more-highly-priced indie comic, but as a thick and quarterly release crammed full of content, I’d say it’s well worth it. Now that the major narrative arch of the first five issues is complete, The Lake Erie Monster will continue to be an ongoing collecting short horror stories. Check them out at http://thelakeeriemonster.com/ for more details!
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Katy Rex writes comics analysis at endoftheuniversecomics.com, comicsbulletin.com, and bloody-disgusting.com. She also writes scholarly articles for various academic journals. She really likes butt jokes, dinosaurs, and killing psychos and midgets in Borderlands 2. She has a great sense of humor if you’re not an asshole.