King City: A Guy, A Cat, a City

Image from Brandon Graham's DeviantArt

Brandon Graham's King City is brilliant. The comics tell the story of a young man named Joe, his cat Earthling, and their adventures in King City. Joe is a Cat Master, an expert at the art of injecting his cat with a variety of juices that give the cat various superpowers. Early in the book, he injects Earthling and feeds the cat a key, and Earthling makes a perfect copy: copy cat. Later, we learn that the cat has a perfect memory: information cat-alog. Not all of his powers are pun-based, but just enough of them are. King City rules.



Joe's best friend is Pete, who wears a luchador-style mask everywhere he goes. Pete is a sweet guy, but he somehow got mixed up with some local thugs who want him to watch over a water-breathing alien for a while. Meanwhile, Joe's ex-girlfriend Anna is now dating Max, who fought in Korea and has nightmares of the xombies he and his unit fought there.

Image from Brandon Graham's DeviantArt

There is a lot to love about King City, and one of the best things about it is the city itself. You can find anything in the city: sexy aliens, dangerous cyborgs, jerk ninjas, ancient demons, and turtle soda whose flavors include divorce (bitter) and victory (sweet). There is a park where the rules include "No burying bodies or gold," "No demon summoning," and "No duels to the death." There is a hotel run by a sasquatch named Lukashev, who used to work for the space program and now defuses missiles in bottles for fun. I could go on about the weird, cool things in King City, but a large part of the fun is discovering these as you go.

Image from Brandon Graham's DeviantArt

Like a good film noir, the story more about setting a mood than following a narrative. There's something about a cult that's up to no good, and a street gang that's trying to stop them but also has its own agenda. Joe and Earthling get mixed up in the conflict. Joe's skills as a Cat Master mean that he and Earthling could influence how things turn out, but first Joe has to figure out what's going on

You never know what Brandon Graham's imagination will come up with next. I loved seeing the visual puns he includes throughout. In one crowd scene, a lady walks by with two tails. There are notes next to her tails identifying one as "tail" and the other as "re-tail." Hanging from the latter is a "re-tail chain." Nearby, one guy is hitting another guy. The one doing the hitting is labeled "Hit Man." The other is labeled simply "Man." Not everything is punny. Sometimes, it's the sheer level of detail that makes the King City pages so much fun to look at. Graham is a master at making a page visually exciting without making it feel cluttered.

Image from Brandon Graham's DeviantArt

The art of King City is energetic and cartoonish, with a lot of influence coming from graffiti art. The girls have round butts and thick, sensual lips, while Joe and Pete look like lovable slackers. Graham crams every part of the page full of details, and even includes special bonuses in the issues, such as a crossword puzzle, a connect-the-dots image, and a board game you can play by cutting out the pieces and moving them around a game board.

Over the course of writing King City, Graham had to wrest control of the story's rights from the original publisher, TokyoPop, so that he could continue under Image. Fortunately, the whole series, from beginning to end, is now available in a single, full-sized volume. As the story goes, you see Graham's style change and develop, so that the comic looks much slicker toward the end. If you like comics that are just a little weird, you may like King City. If you love comics that are extremely weird, you should definitely come to King City! Just watch out for the places to avoid...

Image from Brandon Graham's DeviantArt