guest review by Northwestern medical student Michael Colacci Monsters is a story by Ken Dahl of a man who gets herpes. The story begins with a short 2 page sequence with questions that people looking in on the disease might ask: What does it feel like to not be able to kiss your child, or share a drink, or perform oral sex? We meet our protagonist while in a fairly stable relationship before he learns of his diagnosis. After which, we watch his job, his relationship, and his identity become slowly but completely consumed by herpes. He decides that he… Read More
You’re So Sexy (When You Aren’t Transmitting STDs)
Kiss Me Deadly
preview available at http://www.thehealthyaboriginal.net/comics/KMD.pdf
Monsters
The funniest book about herpes you’ll read this year. Let me make my opinion clear from the outset: this book is superb. A work of genius. I don’t think anyone is able to graphically imbue their characters with such a sense of anxiety and dejection as Ken Dahl does. Many thanks to Martha Cornog for allerting me to the work of Gabby Shulz, a.k.a. Ken Dahl who, according to his blog, still plods on in a series of day jobs in order to pay the bills. He deserves great things, indeed he has just won an Ignatz Award for Monsters. This… Read More
Black Hole
If you like the films of David Lynch… Black Hole is a kind of gothic teen horror story. It is about a disease, known as “the bug” which, once caught by sexual contact with an infected person, causes strange things to happen to the afflicted body. One boy develops an extra mouth on his chest, complete with tiny tongue, a girl periodically sheds her skin, another grows a tail, some are horribly disfigured facially by tumours or warty growths. The stigmata of the disease may be impossible to conceal, facial deformity for example, but some sufferers choose to try and… Read More