Gfrorer, Julia – Flesh and Bone

Website

Flesh and Bone

It’s not easy to pull off being hauntingly dark and funny in the same book, but Julia has pulled it off. On a fundamental level, this comic is about a young man who decides to ask the local witch (?) to reunite him with his dead love. It’s actually much deeper than all that, as he doesn’t want to go to hell for killing himself to be reunited, and it gets into the price the witch has to pay to accommodate him, and the sheer despair that the young man feels seemingly at all times. And have I mentioned that it’s more than a little unnerving at times? It really lingers on him lying on the grave of his lover and how broken of a man that he’s become. I don’t want to dig too much into it for fear of spoilers (and because all of you reading this should really give it a look if you’re a fan of comics), but moments in it that really stood out for me where the initial forest ceremony, the pattern in the tea leaves, his despair, the comment of the witch when she finally sees the man’s lover, those poor kids who wander into the witch’s house, and above all the witch’s conversation with a demon/patron/whatever that thing was. All of the man’s parts were a raw, exposed sadness nerve, while the sections with the witch were… damn, I don’t know what you’d call that. All-knowing but willfully ignorant of certain things? Whatever it was, the whole comic was utterly engrossing. $6