Tripwire Reviews Kill Me And Other Curiosities By Chad Lambert

Universal Woes

Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes reviews Kill Me And Other Curiosities by Chad Lambert, published by Dark Horse…

Kill Me and Other Curiosities by Chad Lambert
Writer: Chad Lambert
Artists: various
Dark Horse

Collecting six stories written by Chad Lambert from Dark Horse Presents, plus another one previously unpublished that slots easily alongside, Kill Me is an anthology of one writer’s concerns. They include self-confidence, dying alone, fulfilling your potential, and being sucked into the capitalist system as a prelude to getting spat out again, so the book’s mildly fantastical elements are grounded in some universal woes. And some pretty common ones for auto-biography comics too, although Lambert and four different artists keep the stories nimble and aware of their own whimsy. These confessions balance internal angst with inexplicable external hassles, in a cosmos apparently magical and also slightly dumb.

All the stories are presented as documentary fact, but eventually Lambert points out which are truthful and which have received some judicious buffing in the writerly imagination. One group of tales follows an individual named Jack Garrett, who first experiences a mild late night time-slip in some soft-boiled noir-ish first person narration, drawn by Tom Williams as a weird fluid hallucination. Later, in the anthology’s title story, an older Jack is planning a lovesick suicide attempt when a bunch of his future selves burst in and some Twilight Zone shenanigans ensue. For these, artist Christine Larsen turns Jack into a more definitive disheveled film noir doofus, foiled even in his self-destruction. Later still, Jack tries to turn his weird encounters into published fiction, and dreamland again plays a part in a poignant story drawn by K. Czap which follows Jack to the end of the line.

The book’s other stories are different, mainly since they concern one Chad Lambert. He addresses the reader at the start and end of each short tale, often while trying to buy Dark Horse Presents at a local comic store, in stories drawn by Apri Kusbiantoro. Chad gets a job on local radio, suffering through painful anxiety attacks and dumb radio DJ mishaps. Eventually made redundant, Chad bemoans his life and the nature of the media business and of the US economy, talking to himself and a comic store employee and to you, self-deprecation being another autobio comics staple.

This anthology puts the stories into a firm order, the Jack Garrett block first before Chad Lambert takes over. In Dark Horse Presents they were originally mingled together and spread out, appearing sporadically from 2012, and Chad’s radio career did not proceed in chronological order from early enthusiasm to being shown the door. Rearranged this way round, the lines between fictional and factual stand-ins are easier to spot, and “Chad Lambert” gets everyone’s universal arc: first an inner dream life full of uncanny possibilities, and then the reality of being overcharged for comics and stuck working at some version of WKRP in Cincinnati or similar, followed by the sack.