Graphic Novel Friday: Summer Terror with Pixu

The element of surprise is in danger of extinction, as the immediacy of online activity allows me to keep tabs on my favorite writers, artists, and publishers. So imagine the smile on my face when an unbound—and very creepy-looking—galley arrived from Dark Horse Comics with a title that was entirely new to me.

Pixu: The Mark of Evil has somehow managed to fly under the radar despite the fact that its creators, twin brothers Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon, Becky Cloonan and Vasilis Lolos, all won Eisner Awards last year for Best Anthology with their self-published title 5. Bá is, of course, the artist behind The Umbrella Academy, the 2008 Eisner winner for Best Limited Series, as well as our pick for #1 Graphic Novel of 2008. He has also been nominated for a 2009 Eisner for his work on the continuation of The Umbrella Academy‘s second volume, Dallas (to be collected this fall). Becky Cloonan is best-known for her 2006 Eisner Award-nominated work Demo, which was a delight. I admit that I mostly know of Fábio Moon’s work through his awesome collaboration with Joss Whedon on Sugarshock (collected in the MySpace Dark Horse Presents Vol. 1), and am unfamiliar with Vasilis Lolos' resume.

Pixu is a four-way collaborative Horror comic, and it works. The level at which Pixu crept under my skin was unexpected. It’s practically summer! Horror never seems as scary to me when the days are longer, and the weather brightens. But Pixu has that humid, claustrophobic feel to it. It’s all tight spaces and long moments of silence, when everyone seems to be waiting on something to inch close. And when the violence comes, it punctuates. The five terrorized tenants in Pixu should have the natural inclination to flee when things start going very wrong in their living quarters, but they are all compelled to stare just a minute longer into that abyss and watch it creep.

These aren’t five strangers banding together to fight an evil force; these people know one another (sometimes in the most unsettling of ways). The intimacy of two characters in particular is very much taboo, and by doing more than hint at their relationship, Pixu succeeded in staying with me even after I’d safely tucked it away on my shelf. But I kept returning to it and trying to get others to read it. It’s viral. You’d think the four different artists would make for jarring visuals, but—again—it works. That’s what is frightening about their efforts: this type of horror story shouldn’t make sense, but it does.

In an interview with comicbookresources.com, Fábio Moon gave insight into the nature of the project:

“I see it all the time, and I’m sure you have, too. Try to remember a place you know where something bad happened. After that, that place was never seen with the same eyes by you, as if it was tainted by the bad memories. We remember places by events we had in those places (or events we know happened there), so the “bad” places will always have that stain, that ghost.”

Pixu: The Mark of Evil releases later this June.