Freaks of the Heartland

July 30, 2012
Like so many great stories that feature characters who are seen, for lack of a better term, as “freaks,” this six-issue collection by Niles (30 Days of Night) and Ruth (Conan) asks the reader to consider the age-old question of who the real freaks among us are. The story examines the relationship between two brothers, Trevor and Will Owen, the latter a monstrous humanoid who, though only six years old, towers over his slightly older brother and is possessed of strange and unusual powers. No one but Trevor really understands his brother’s true nature, however, since Will has been locked away since birth. When Trevor tries to protect Will from their father, events are set in motion that will bring the pair face to face with a secret that their community has harbored for many years. Ruth’s ability to bring his brand of realism to both the mundane and the phantasmagoric in Niles’s narrative is precisely what makes the story so compelling. Some readers may think the story needs further development, but this one is a case of “less is more.”

August 1, 2005
Niles, a prolific writer of all shades of horror script, grisly to guffaw inducing, for several comics publishers, here offers an underdeveloped variation on John Wyndham's sf classic " The Midwich Cuckoos" (1957), in which mutant children are born simultaneously to a community's women, and it compounds failing to explain the basic situation with dialogue written in " Beverly Hillbillies " patois. All Niles gives artist Ruth to work with is an escape-and-chase scenario as one boy, after preventing Dad from shooting his monstrous brother, rounds up the other mutants and leads them in an attempted breakout from their home valley. Fortunately, Ruth rises to and exceeds the occasion. Working in pen and ink and watercolor, and limiting his palette to black, white, and sepia that he expressively alters with varying admixtures of yellow and red, Ruth creates one knockout panel after another. The night settings of many scenes allow Rembrandtesque lighting effects that Ruth exploits in tandem with the narrow range of color to deepen characterizations beyond anything Niles has written. A triumph of presentation over (lack of) substance. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)