This is Roman Dirge's baby, a remastered edition of the first four issues of the original Lenore series, and it's basically a collection of gag strips, heavy on the macabre humour, mostly starring a cute little dead girl, Lenore, and her sadistic tendencies.Because this is remastered and special and stuff, Roman Dirge has coloured it himself because according to the introduction he originally envisioned Lenore in colour and he didn't want to hire a colourist to do a "half-ass" job.
And I don't know. With an introduction like that you sort of expect something spectacular, you know? Dirge tells us how much effort and time it took to remaster these issues, and I can totally respect that, because I'd recently read a piece somewhere about the monstrous amount of work that went into making Absolute Watchmen look pretty, but maybe the introduction could have been done a bit more prudently. Put simply, I don't mind if an introduction to a book tells me about the effort that went into a book, but I get kind of iffy about it when said pimping is done by the guy who did the entire book. If you have an introduction by someone else, that's cool. Grant Morrison apparently loves the comics of Mark Waid and Geoff Johns and I don't agree with that (and I almost choked on something when I was reading a Johns-Morrison interview during which I'm at least thirty percent sure they were making out) but it's cool, because it's someone else dishing out the love. This introduction, a casual "oh, by the by, I worked really really hard on this because it's my baby" before you even read the first strip, is unfair, really. It makes you feel dirty if you happen to dislike the work. Either that or it makes you expect the work to be very fucking good.
So, yes, I had a point somewhere in there, and I was talking about the colouring, I believe. It does show that Roman Dirge does his own colouring, because there's a visible effort to preserve the original lines. That sounds like a bad thing, but it isn't necessarily; in Noogies, the purpose of the colouring is mainly for atmosphere. It's soft and is always secondary to the pencils and the story, but it helps make the tone that much darker than black-and-white because sometimes the content of the strip calls for a more textured atmosphere, and Roman Dirge does that blues-and-purples-y haunted house palette very skilfully.
While the colours can be dead on in select places, they are also just about redundant in other strips. One of my favourite uses of colouring is the Soylent Green strip in the first issue. It's an interlude-type thing, and there's a lot of negative space used for that whimsical, poetic feel. And Roman Dirge's murky colours go very very well with negative space. Unfortunately that strip is just about one-of-a-kind in Noogies. The rest of the colours look like they've been plonked down for the sake of colouring. It's amateurish stuff that can sometimes beef up the comedy value of the odd strip, but for the most part stands in the corner looking sheepish, existing only to draw attention from Dirge's brush strokes. His style isn't consistent and you can literally see him draw better as the book progresses, and sometimes the colours just cover up bits of that experience.
Some of the strips don't call for atmosphere, but the colours are lovingly rendered all over the place nonetheless, and more often than not it doesn't quite work. Lenore, as comic book art, would benefit from moderation in terms of colour. It would have been better served to hang on to the style used in Soylent Green, to bring focus to the figurework, and the wishy-washy colours could then be used for bold, dramatic atmospherics. Less is more, etc. I get that it's a labour of love, but the colouring isn't quite there yet. And I suppose it doesn't help that I'm not the biggest fan of the overtly digital colouring style.
Moving away from the colours, Roman Dirge is a fairly competent humourist and he has a good eye for staging things, and for comedic juxtaposition. He's good at the general, formulaic humour stuff, and it's a formula that works, so he holds the fuck onto it. The slightly surreal Burton-esque drawing style helps immensely to make his sense of humour very tangible and alive. His work has got tons of personality, which keeps things surprisingly light-hearted for a work that's about death and dead things and dark stuff.
It does sort of require you to have the same sense of humour as Roman Dirge to appreciate the book, though. It veers very dangerously towards a series of tasteless sight gags, with Roman Dirge's abilities as an artist reining things in a little. I'm assuming the goal of the gag strips are to have you laugh and then immediately feel guilty for laughing, because of the subject matter, a la Perry Bible Fellowship, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes Dirge's formula feels old and overused, sometimes the jokes are a bit tasteless even while trying not to be tasteless.
It's not for everyone, and it's probably a good comic for kids (I'm slowly starting to believe that all comics are good for kids). To be read slowly, in small doses, for maximum enjoyment, and do yourself a favour and skip the bloody introduction. If you're the sort of person who likes reading old Metal Men comics or Kubert-Kanigher war comics then I suppose that won't be a problem. I won't deny that this thing made me chuckle several times, and while not all the strips worked for me, you're going to find gems here and there. And I do think that Lenore would make an ace webcomic.
