Jigsaw Noir

Cory McCallum and Matthew Daley celebrate their win at the 2013 Joe Shuster Awards by consuming their trophy.Cory McCallum and Matthew Daley's noir world starts off like any other: a city of dark towers in the middle of a heatwave, and something big is going on that nobody can solve but a rough-around-the-edges private investigator. The Pig Sleep features Mr. Monitor, a monitor lizard in a sleuthing hat, who pokes around an underworld made up of jigsaw shapes reassembled into crooks and stoolies. It was Daley's more-than-anything art that convinced me to part with my five bucks at The Beguiling. I'm no expert on indie comics, but it was exciting to see something unusual like this, which doesn’t fit either Billy Mavreas's squishy style of drawings or what I will clumsily label cartoon realism. Daley's strips look like they were made with scissors and glue. Arms with three or four elbows bent at 90 degrees stretch over heads and frame text blocks, against a grainy backdrop static and city towers.McCallum's story and words ham up the noir genre in a way that only compliments Daley's quirky criminals. He describes Mr. Monitor's town as “a nightmare at the best of times / streets of slimey and slippery scofflaws / corners crowded by crooked culprits / hustlers hustling, goons gooning. / ... This is my office. These are my colleagues.” Meanwhile triangular thugs bounce beneath a dark skyline and a bird-like creature lights a stick of dynamite. McCallum's over-the-top rhetoric might be attributed to his career as a songwriter, but on the other hand it might just be childish exuberance.This slim book is beefed up with four single-page bonus strips, which are even more stylized.  In Mr. Monitor 2069 (previously published in Broken Pencil), we find Dr. Seuss-style rhymes like “No heads in jars / No flying cars / No fuel to send their ships to Mars." Daley's panels are highly inventive signs, as in road signs and pictorial in-case-of-emergency pamphlets.It's November and so if you're a student, or perhaps if you're just suffering from Fall Launch Season fatigue, The Pig Sleep is small enough that you can slip it easily between the pages of your required reading and take a glance here and there when you feel you need a break.