Tripwire Reviews Mike Mignola’s Bowling With Corpses And Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown

Journey Into Mystery

Tripwire’s senior editor Andrew Colman reviews Mike Mignola’s Bowling With Corpses And Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown…

Bowling With Corpses And Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown
Writer/ Artist: Mike Mignola
Dark Horse Comics

Mignola reveals a great deal about how this remarkably engaging project came about in his afterword – considering himself “semi-retired”, the Hellboy writer / artist started conjuring elements in his head concerning a midnight fictional world of medieval fantasy separate from anything he’d done before, while employing a methodology that for him was totally “ass backwards” – in other words, world-building rather than focusing on the protagonists first. Sketching this new locale, Mignola quickly saw the milieu he had in mind coalesce around “wobbly castles and crumbling villages” all perched on ragged clifftops, the clothes and head wear of the players, rickety staircases, pitch black caves, blacksmiths, primitive kitchens, etc. – all antediluvian markers for a place carefully assembled through old photos and drawings. What underpins everything here is how it was put together as a labour of fun and compulsion, and although the finished product doesn’t have a banner character on which the action is focused, it’s the mystery, enshrouded myth, mood and atmospherics that take centre stage.

Bowling with Corpses (and other strange tales from lands unknown) is an ode not just to Mignola’s influences but to his unconscious, making this book (as he states) inevitable. Each segment or chapter is a fable, detailing the journey of marginal players who somehow avoid succumbing to myriad hidden forces of darkness. In the first story, the protagonist is a wide-eyed servant boy called Yeb the Spoon, who decides to “go out into the world to seek his fortune”. As darkness falls, he is ambushed by a gang of corpses who challenge him to “bowl three rounds” – if he wins, he has his reward, but if he doesn’t, he joins their ranks. He wins but his prize is a magic bone that he plucks from their leader. He then sets off for the cursed town of Unzio which is controlled by a cadre of warlocks. The rest of the tale involves scenes of the boy casually wading through carnage, fending off vampire bats and encountering surreal visions. It’s daft, ersatz and tonally very offhand, but it works very well – both a straightforward and ironic paean to particularly grim fairy tales interlaced with horror tropes.

The following stories focus on the birth and history of the world’s gods and man’s place within it, its pre-history, the ancient stories passed down through generations, houses haunted by malign spirits, greed-driven conspirators searching for (and finding) the secret of immortality, and other mystical adornments. The dialogue is clipped, curt, didactic and to the point, the shadowy calm of this benighted world frequently disrupted by graphic, at times gothically psychedelic yet mercifully brief violence. The diffident bystanders who bookend each section (often animals or birds) are vaguely reminiscent of DC horror hosts Cain and Abel, minus the arch humour. All in all, this is as entertaining a project that Mignola has created for some time, its knowing wit, sense of time and place, characterisation and beguiling evocation of time-honoured (yet subverted) folklore a winning formula for further long-form works in this newly-devised world featuring his unique artistic footprint. I for one will definitely be checking them out.

Bowling With Corpses And Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown is out now from Dark Horse Comics