“That's a Moray!”:
A Review of Doug TenNapel's Creature Tech
TenNapel, Doug. Creature Tech. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf
Productions, 2002. 180p.
There is something of simple wonder lodged behind the hyper-kinetic art,
attention deficit plotting, wolfish humor, and grab-bag characters of Creature
Tech. What makes the book rise above itself is just how simple
it all becomes when you look past the conflict between the embittered, young
scientist and the demon-handed zombie sorcerer who, out of pride, changes
cats into demons in order to better plague the Earth with mountain-range-sized
space eels.
And you say, “With the what now?”
But wait, I’m not done. I haven’t yet mentioned that the evil sorcerer
was a scientist himself during the California gold rush.. After a failed
attempt to summon the giant space eels, even when assisted by his self-doubting,
blood-bound, cat-demon, Hellcat, Dr. Jameson finds himself without a body
for long decades laid end-to-end. Only after slipping his ghostly self
inside Turlock, California’s Research Technical Institute (it was the
locals who started calling it Creature Tech, damn them!), setting free a
slow-moving slugbeast (in a classic, one-piece swimsuit), and revivifying
himself with the stolen Shroud of Turin can the wicked zombie/part-demon/sorcerer/scientist
return to his aforementioned eel bonanza. Check your temperature; now
tell me, how many degrees of confused are you? If the mercury goes
too high in the glass, you might want to walk away now--this is only the
set-up of the plot as it unfolds over the first dozen pages. If anything,
from here the pace picks up into overdrive. Some might even argue that
it cuts out the middle man and jumps straight into hyperspace.
Doug TenNapel’s vision, in bold black-and-white inks, is like one of those
endless fever dreams that you wake from to find that the sleep only lasted
minutes. There is a hopeless inventiveness to this book which goes so far
away from the explainable that it is a shock just how cleanly the break
is when it all snaps back. As the story progresses, it would seem
safe to assume that the role of the protagonist, Dr. Michael Ong,
is simply to react to the heavy rain of absurdities, which, of course, includes
his government-assigned mantis bodyguard and the alien parasite that replaces
his heart and learns kung-fu (dialogue included) from late-night television.
Somehow, though, each of these elements stacks up and holds its own weight
as Dr. Ong starts to question what differences there are, if any, between
faith and science.
As elsewhere, the center of this story is in the interaction of the characters;
in this aspect, despite its wild overload of science fiction and horror
tropes, Creature Tech exhibits a stark, simple delicacy. When
Michael Ong discovers that his father, a reverend, sacrificed science for
religion, he rebels and drops out of seminary school to embrace cold, mathematical
truths. In time, fate (and maybe a teensy dollop of governmental [and
metaphysical] conspiracy) brings Michael back home to rural Turlock and his
father’s flock. He also returns to Katie, who he physically scarred
with his youthful cruelty and who, he now realizes, he might have always
loved. And sure, the zombie sorcerer, the giant space eels, the hell
cats, the mantis’s search for friendship, the conspiracy, the Shroud, the
parasite and all of that come into play, but they are somehow muted by these
quiet, personal moments.
It is TenNapel’s skilled art that accomplishes this. While most of
the book is a stylized combination of stark Lovecraftian images and TenNapel’s
own heights-of-lunacy designs for the massively successful Earthworm Jim
video game franchise, he surprises again and again with his simple evocations
of beauty. There is a short series of panels where the audience becomes
aware of why Michael loves Katie, just as he realizes himself. In
the first, one half of her face is masked in shadow, the other in long-worn
sorrow. She turns toward the window in the second panel, her face
now removed from shadow but hidden by hair; her reflection is a wavering
ghost in the glass. Then, magic happens. The last shot of this
sequence reveals her face in full, now bathed in light, sweetly smiling,
her terrible scars now pulling away from her dead eye like a wash of tears.
Even in TenNapel’s insane world, there is still nothing as redeeming as
being able to make someone else this happy. This single image is the
tether that holds all of the “what if?” imaginations of the story from spinning
out of control.
After this, everything makes more sense. Even as the absurdities
continue to mount, the method starts to crack though the madness.
In a way, this is only so far removed from ye olden traveling morality plays
but, if the devil is, indeed, in the details, then…well…he’s huge!
Mountains awaken, the sky opens up, demons walk the Earth, butcher shops
go on short journeys of self discovery and, at the center of it all, one
man has a crisis of faith.