Beasts Of Burden; Jill Thompson & Evan Dorkin

The first issue of Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson's Beast Of Burden arrived at finer comic stores everywhere today so there's no excuse not to be having a good day! Beasts Of Burden is the continuing adventures of a group of dogs and a cat that get involved in things of a supernatural nature. The two previous stories appeared in the excellent Dark Horse short story anthology hardcovers Book of Witchcraft (which won an Eisner for best short story) and Book of Hauntings (which won artist Jill Thompson an Eisner for best painter). Beasts Of Burden is a four issue series, of which every issue will be self contained and doesn't require familiarity with the previous stories (but after reading the first issue of Beasts Of Burden there's a good chance you'll want to read the other ones).

Fans of Evan Dorkin (creator / cartoonist of Milk and Cheese and Hectic Planet) and Jill Thompson (writer / artist of Scary Godmother and Magic Trixie, artist on Sandman Brief Lives and too many other books to mention) already know that whenever they do their comic book magic that they're in for level A quality, but for any newbies out there reading this, all you have to know is comic books by Dorkin and Thompson are comic books you'll want to share with others, whether they are already comic readers or not. Beasts Of Burden features talking animals and the supernatural, but it's not done in a sappy young readers fashion and since the supernatural parts of Beasts Of Burden aren't Vertigo level, I'd say this is a great comic for people (including kids) of all ages.

Speaking of Jill Thompson and her amazing art prowess, way back in 1997 when the internet was just a baby, she was kind enough to grace Kate and myself with an original piece of art (pictured above) that we used as our wedding invitations. I hope no one reading this blog entry falls too much in love with this image and asks Jill Thompson to do the same for them because she may kill me (grin), but I just wanted to share this with friends and readers of my blog who haven't seen this slice of awesomeness!