Book-Thirsty Thursday: The Creeps, Fran Krause

The Creeps mixes a little bit of dark humor, a lot of outright uncanny fears, and a fascinating art style in this collection of comics.

Yours truly is pretty sure it’s actually impossible to know every single comic artist working on the Internet these days. Sure, you might follow one or two, but there are just a lot of them out there. So, when Ten Speed Press sent me Fran Krause’s The Creeps, I was not really surprised to find that Krause runs a website, Deep Dark Fears, where people submit their fears and he turns them into comic strips.

With that in mind, though, The Creeps takes on a new layer of, well, creepiness. These aren’t just stories that Krause spins up. He even lists credits at the end of the book! (Most of them are simply listed as coming from “anonymous,” though.) His work is simply to bring them to life in illustrated form. He doesn’t adhere to a single form, however. There are single-panel, two-panel, and four-panel stories. The last is most common, but Krause carefully drops in different formats to break the fatigue up.

Speaking of formats, there are actually a couple sets of full-pagers here that also take up more than two pages, “My Attic Room” and “The Bridge.” In them, Krause plays with the idea of format and breaks out of the constraints of panels. Sometimes it’s slightly hard to follow where the next piece of text is, especially in “My Attic Room,” where Krause gets a little too clever with where he places the narration, but like the differing numbers of panels, they do help break up just reading comic after comic.

Somehow, though, it’s hard not to get pulled in to this collection. There’s something a little voyeuristic about reading people’s confessed worries. It doesn’t matter if they seem rational or irrational to you. At the same time, though, there’s something comforting about the idea that you’re not the only person out there who has some maybe-strange ideas.

And, oddly enough, The Creeps actually manages to work in a lot of visual humor. Maybe it’s that Krause’s ghosts are often bedsheet-style. Perhaps it’s just the idea of illustrating these things. For example, “Fear #35” is a personal favorite. The fairly simple illustration of a fear about being shoved on a train platform ends with its main character smiling and facedown (you’ll have to read why), and it’s enough to provoke a snicker.

When Krause does pack detail in, however, it actually sends the book right back into scary-town. That contrast also helps keep a reader guessing, too, and keeps them from falling into an emotional rut.

Having not read Deep Dark Fears before, it seems like Krause has some great skill in that contrasting. It would be easy to go all scary. Admittedly, it could just be my own sense of humor that makes me find the fun in the book, but it really does seem like Krause was trying to do it that way.

Next: Review: A Poison Dark and Drowning

By the nature of its subject matter, The Creeps simply isn’t going to be for everyone. There are those who prefer to avoid horror in all its forms — and even Krause’s art style doesn’t prevent the occasional depictions of blood from being able to weird someone out. But for those who are willing to take a walk on the strange side, it’s a new way to look at something we all share: frights and terrors.

The Creeps has now gone on sale; check out Krause’s blog, linked above, for more, and thanks again to Ten Speed Press for the copy.