Review time! with ‘The Strange Disappearance of Barnabas Jones’

“It’s a groovy night and I can show you how to use it, come along with me and put your mind at ease”

Behemoth Comics brings us The Strange Disappearance of Barnabas Jones, an unusual superhero story from writer (and co-letterer) Damian Connelly, artist Kundo Krunch, letterer Athos Pastore, and translator Annabella Mazzaferri (Connelly is Argentinian, so I assume this was originally in Spanish). How about we take a peek at it?

TSDoBJ is a fairly standard superhero story, dressed up to be a bit weirder than your regular Avengers or Justice League book but not that fundamentally different from it, either. In the city of Goddard in the year 2040, Barnabas Jones, a big-time hero, has disappeared. I know, right? A young lady named Anima Riot brings a group of specially-powered individuals together to figure out what happened to him. That’s basically it. There’s not really a reason for them to find Barnabas, except that Anima’s father knew him and she misses him. Goddard is a dangerous place, it seems, so they have to fight some weird things, but nothing weirder than you might find in a regular superhero comic. There’s a trip to another dimension ruled by … well, that’s a fun part of the book, so I won’t give it away, but suffice it to say that the ruler has nefarious plans that might include Anima’s dimension, so I guess they have to stop him. But it’s unclear. Part of the problem of the book is that it seems like Anima and her gang aren’t really necessary for the plot to resolve in a satisfying way, so it’s kind of strange that they’re doing so much. It’s like that episode of The Big Bang Theory (yes, sorry, I have been watching it since it came on TBS, because at 5 o’clock I’m done with the day and I can’t watch a long movie because it’s almost dinner time) where Amy ruins Raiders of the Lost Ark for the nerds by pointing out that Indy is superfluous. It doesn’t seem like Anima and her team do anything to actually rescue Barnabas. It’s odd.

The other problem is that, while a plot might be kind of bland, characters can make up for it, but not in this case. People have for years criticized Grant Morrison for being “weird for weird’s sake,” and while I agree with that for a tiny percentage of their output, I disagree with that for the most part. But this book is definitely “weird for weird’s sake,” as the characters don’t really have much going for them except that they’re weird. Anima tells us a little about them, but they don’t really stand out too much – one of them has a sentient gun, another is a voodoo witch, and so on – and except for Anima, who gets a tiny bit more character development, they’re not that interesting. Barnabas isn’t in the book enough to be much of a character, and the villain, as visually unusual as he is, isn’t all that interesting, either. It’s frustrating, because Connelly seems to think that throwing weird shit into a book – the aforementioned sentient gun, zombies, giant dolls, gun-toting pandas – is enough to make a book interesting. It’s not, unfortunately. There’s not a lot to keep us invested in the story – it’s just a standard superhero story, and that’s really not enough.

Krunch’s art is decent enough, in a Dean Ormstom/Shaky Kane kind of way, which I enjoy, so it’s neat. His figures are a bit stiff, but not in a bad way, as the slightly off-kilter nature of his figure work makes the comic far weirder than the story does. His design work is very nice – the book is in landscape orientation, so the pages are wider than they are tall, and Krunch uses that well. There are some interesting layouts, with occasional circular panels helping our eye flow well over the page. He creates a nice, weird city, one that feels like it should have gotten more attention from the story (Connelly claims Goddard is a strange place, but we only get that through a little of the art, not from anything in the story). He uses well-placed hatching to make the characters look a bit rougher, as if life in the city isn’t easy and these characters have been through a lot. When we get to the villain, he does a good job making him familiar but odd, which works well when you find out what’s going on. Visually, it’s an interesting book, which goes some way toward making the story work better, but not quite enough.

I wish I liked this better, but it’s not a terrible book, just not a great one. It’s a standard superhero book with some nifty art, but that’s about it. There’s nothing terribly unusual about Barnabas Jones’s disappearance, and there’s nothing terribly unusual about the way Anima and her team find him. It’s a decent read, I guess, but kind of forgettable. Too bad. (You can get it fairly cheap at the link below, so if you are interested, go there!)

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆