The Lobster is back! Is this another memorable appearance, or one as easy to overlook as the man in the title?
Written by Mike Nignola & John Arcudi
Illustrated by Peter Snejbjerg
Colored by Dave Stewart
Lettered by Clem RobinsAfter a transient goes missing, Lobster Johnson is called in to investigate a priest who practices more than just religion. What he’s got cooking in his stew pot is nothing compared to what he has hiding in the sewers below . . .
Greg: We’re pinch-hitting for Mark this week, and Mignola & company served up a perfect meal for us with this Lobster Johnson one-shot. Why don’t you start us off, Paul?
Paul: Lobster Johnson has become the place in the Mignolaverse to tell a certain kind of story: the proto-superhero with preternatural abilities, simultaneously the hard-boiled detective chasing all manner of villainy. A perfect distillation of the pulps! If you think about it. The villainy mixes Tommy-gun toting gangsters with almost tawdry tinges of monster horror exploiting paranoias. But our hero is aided by his crew of loyal motleys and a Hepburn-esque (that’s Katharine, not Audrey, young people) reporter.
Greg: It’s certainly sending out a Shadow-like vibe, if maybe a little too .45-heavy for the Doc Savage takes I’ve read. But I could definitely see a story like this in a mag fronted by a man with a red scarf and slouch hat.
Paul: Sure!
Purer pulp is rare these days, with LoJo’s current string of one-shots achieving an even terser level of concision, somehow depicting with 21st century decompression a full-fledged but taut early 20th-century story in a paltry 22 pages. It’s almost as if the creative team Snejbjerg really wanted to push themselves to be as spare and scrupulous in comics as Dashiell Hammett in prose.
Reverse-engineer the script to this one and you’ll find the gems of a good one-shot. Recognizable characters serving multiple narrative functions, characters you’ll know if you’ve hung around the Lobster but not necessary if this is the first Mignolaverse you’ve picked up from the newsstand. Familiar drumbeats of social ills (homeless vets and Depression-era Hoovervilles) mounting to a crescendo of religious cult zombie cannibals in the sewers (it all happens too fast to merit a spoiler warning).
Greg: I like that Arcudi & Mignola keep LoJo away from the spotlight as much as they do. Not to say that he isn’t in the book, because he certainly is and is active to boot, but he’s not our entry point into the story.
It’s been a good while since I read some “Lobster Johnson”, but I don’t remember his stories falling into a trap that a lot of pulp-revival titles do. They’re so enamored with their pulpy lead that they make them the POV character when most of them don’t have the depth (in either developed character or creator skill) to support that kind of demand in keeping the reader engaged, at least for me. Opening with an outside character and quickly establishing reasons for the reader to care about them, then having them bring the reader with them (figuratively speaking) when they interact with the LoJo cast is a smart cut-to-the-chase way to bring new readers into the fold, and Arcudi & Mignola do that with pulp-level brevity.
Paul: Snejbjerg’s art stands somewhere between the illustrative clean of Tonci Zonjic and the impressionistic craggliness of Guy Davis, both memorable renderers of Lobster’s world. His line and shadow somehow fit the smooth curves of 30’s metropolitan architecture, worn men with earned stubble, Rube Goldberg speculative machinery, blammo pistola action, AND the gross undead. None of those elements rises to the surface as spectacular but it’s a worthy enough feat to make them coexist so seamlessly in 22 pages of pulpy visual poetry.
Greg: It’s funny you mention where Snejbjerg’s art falls on your particular scale. Mike Romeo talked about this comic in our Robots From Tomorrow Pull List ep for this week, and the idea of pegging down his influences (or stylistic classmates) came up. We threw out names like Steve Parkhouse, Steve Dillon, Chris Samnee, and Terry Moore, but I can also definitely see your Zonjic & Davis beats, for sure. It has to speak to his versatility in general that Snejbjerg can bend his style in ways to fit in with a wide range of disparate books (like “Starman”, “The Light Brigade”, “A God Somewhere”, and even his multiple prior stops in the Mignolaverse) and still never look like anything other than Snejbjerg. Which is a great thing for a book that links as much plot punch on creepy figurework as this one does, because that man can render some unnerving-looking humans, alive or (un)dead.
Continued belowPaul: The book’s big mystery is who is the forgotten man? Disappeared transient Morrie? Inquisitive and skeptical veteran Isaiah Hatcher? Preacher-cum-chef Brother Frank, whatever his true identity? Lobster the avenging angel of proletarian justice? Or some bygone noble masculinity, some ideal of anti-authoritarian fraternity, some pre-technological humanism? Nuts to all that, I say. What’s forgotten is how fun short tales can be when well told.
Greg: Agreed!
Final Verdict: 8.5 — Wheyher you are a Mignolaverse regular or new to Lobster Johnson, you can pick up this comic confident in getting a well-told shot of comic booking.
