Travis Hedge Coke
I Keep Coming Back is not particularly strong Alan Moore. It is a strong comic, but it does not bear the marks. It runs the same guy ropes as his piece where the narrative of Dracula is a repeating motif throughout generations. It kind of plays like a blip against his From Hell. A parodic extra. A for fun story that is the opposite of fun.
Patricia Highsmash
The Murder Tourists and Oscar Zarate
by Travis Hedge Coke
I Keep Coming Back is a good comic, adapted by Oscar Zarate. It is a beautiful comic, whose ugliness is made more cruel for the penetrative energy and stacked mobility of the art.
Zarate turns sweeping the stairs into a meditative state. He turns a figure’s glance at us or away, into a personal interaction with every reader. Blacks and whites change place, change emphasis, foreground, then background.
Zarate uses bodies as both background and foreground. The comic, as it goes along, loses its architecture the way its words lose the dominance we often give them in an Alan Moore comic. Bodies stacked around bodies. An allground of body, flesh, and hair.
The ribbed lens glass of one panel reflects in its liquid ripples, the slicing shadows of another, the smeared out faces of women as seen by a misogynist, the increasing facedness of misogynists, of men without much character.
Zarate commits amazing acts with glass, with faces, with a return to architecture, to streets and walls, signposts and moulding, when we need skin the most, when we crave face, want safety or satiety.
And, it is the backstory that sends us reeling over to the beginning again, to read it again. While the art is the show stealer, it is written as an unofficial coda to From Hell and Alan Moore calls it “a completely true-life story.”
The comic was originally published in Yuggoth Cultures, a collection of adaptations and original short comics all written by Moore and transfigured by different artists. There is no weak art in the collection, but some things are less silly in prose than in picture, and Me and Dorothy Parker probably needs a good singer to sing.
Oscar Zarate turns in the finest art in the collection. He burns down the house, while others are grappling with red devil rape and self-congratulatory Dorothy Parker sex.
Is it that misogyny is always coming back? Is it because it is a “true-life” story? Is Zarate simply that better, or here working in a better state? Something real in the fear here that the porno fugue and witty extrapolation stories lack, a grounding, ground up, ground down ugly? Zarate’s pages breathe. His panels hold their breath.
But, whose life is this true to? The point of view, the perspective we have is skewed and ugly and very realistic, but in a disagreeable fashion. Believable is not the same as agreeable or correct. The art is dizzying and pathetically obsessed, but intentionally so. Zarate’s hand above the directing senses of the protagonist can be felt and kind of hold us back in their lines.
