Sometimes, when I feel like I’m drowning in capes and nerd-rage, I like to step back a bit and find some comics that aren’t even trying to be a part of that scene and take a chance on them. It’s not something I do as often as I’d like, given my budget, but I did it with Erik T. Johnson’s The Outliers, and I’m glad I did.
It’s a story about a young man named Tsu, who looks to be attending Schrodinger Public School, and he’s an outcast freak among obnoxious jerks like his fellow student Jespers because he never speaks. In fact, when a bus breaks down and Jespers is forced to ride the short bus with Tsu, he goes off on why he thinks the mute boy’s a freak – one time, when he was being bullied, Tsu did speak – “oggidy boogidy gookity” stuff, as he describes it – and then he vanished, and there was stink and noise that they ran away from. The harassment soon becomes a fight, and the bus goes out of control on the rain-slicked road and crashes over a cliff, getting hung up in trees – and that’s when Tsu starts speaking again, and his weird connection with nature reveals that he can summon a giant humanoid creature which looks like a cross between a yeti and the Swamp Thing – and the monster picks the bus up and puts it back on the road. It’s eerie and strange. The woods have eyes. Everything is black and white and green… and they’re being followed by a mysterious professor and his dragon-driver Chuba.
Once Tsu makes it home, everything becomes black and white and blue instead, marking the tonal shift as we look into Tsu’s home life. His mother is caring, but also may be a bit absentee with her limo-mandating banquet-going life with a man named Bert. After heating up a microwave dinner, Tsu is paid a visit by the professor, a short scientist who looks like a cross between a chimpanzee and the face-melting Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark. He’s creepy, wanting to know about Tsu’s monster friend, but Tsu says nothing until threatened by Chuba, who has apparently done something horrible to Jespers… and then it’s one nonsense word that scares the beast-driver off. Tsu then retreats into his home, gets fully dressed, grabs a skateboard, summons the giant monster and then rides off into the darkness on its shoulder.
The Outliers is apparently a Kickstarter beneficiary published by Alternative Comics, and it definitely feels like an indie book, in the best of ways. Johnson’s artwork has that spare, emotive essence to it, depicting the isolated life of Tsu and focusing on the small moments of mundane life as much as it does on the mysterious connection to monsters. There is some level of spookiness to everything, particularly with the prof and his dragon servant, but there’s an odd calm about it as well, since Tsu may be an outcast, but he doesn’t seem particularly troubled by it. It seems he doesn’t much mind being where the wild things are.
You won’t go wrong if you want to check out The Outliers as well. It’s a nice change of pace and a reminder that superheroes aren’t everything, and they should never be the only thing.
