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Wiedeman, Sophia – The Deformitory

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The Deformitory

I’m guessing that somewhere along the line the Xeric Foundation people have screwed up and funded an awful comic, but I have yet to see one.  Much like how everything I’ve seen from Secret Acres has been amazing, everything I’ve seen with that Xeric name mentioned has either been an incredible comic or clearly the work of somebody who has all kinds of potential.  This one, luckily, is a bit of both.  This is the story of the Deformitory (as you may have guessed from the title), a place where people with deformities go to live normal lives.  This isn’t readily apparent at first, as the story starts off with a young boy seeing a unicorn in the forest.  He grows up, meets a nice girl and seems destined to have a normal life, but he can’t get the unicorn out of his head and builds the Deformitory.  Well, it probably wasn’t called that yet, as he wasn’t deformed, and he grows old there hoping to catch another glimpse of the creature.  One necessity in a story like this is to have the Deformitory seem like a real place, a place where all sorts of odd people enter and leave.  This is nicely taken care of with a couple of pages before the introduction of the next character, as Sophia shows a good number of oddities living their lives, some of which enter the story in a more significant way later, some of which do not.  This is where we first see Doloris, who becomes essentially the main character in the book.  We see her sitting quietly with two stumps instead of hands and proceed to learn through the rest of the book how this came to be.  Also featured prominently are the Heart Monster (with one of the better uses of the full page center spread that I’ve seen), the ugliest mermaid and a girl who is half slug.  It all comes back to Doloris and the old man and his wait for the unicorn, but I’ve said too much already and this is definitely one of those books where you need to see these things for yourself.   Kudos to Sophia as well for making some things that are genuinely new, as at least a couple of the deformed people were absolutely unique, and the single panel most of those characters got spoke volumes about them.   Really, this is a success in every way.  Check it out, it’s well worth your time and cash.  $6

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