This is a damned weird comic, with things to say about goth culture, 80s nostalgia, right-wing and left-wing political foibles and the notion that beauty is more than skin deep. It also has monsters, cybernetics and plenty of explosions. Try to imagine Blade Runner as reimagined by Tim Burton with a 1950s spin, and you've gotten close. Remender has more neat ideas than the story has room for, which results in some occasionally clunky storytelling and stop-and-start pacing, but he also has three intriguing lead characters and some strong gray-tone art courtesy of John Heebink and Mike Manley.
Doll and Creature fits right in with the expectations I have from Planet Lar, and I can easily see why this appealed to Larry Young. The lead character, Gristle, is a 50s-era rebel with cybernetics and monster features, his female sidekick/partner/love interest is a curvy and spunky young lady unafraid to challenge the stupid social conventions of her society, and the third member of this triad of lead characters is a somewhat twisted freak out for himself who reminds me of nothing as much as the Peter Lorre character in Casablanca. The love triangle amongst the three, in which Modo (the Lorre character) seems the most interested and conversely the least likely, is abbreviated but makes for an interesting undercurrent, and the strange relationship between Modo and Gristle also makes for a strong spine on which to hang the story.
The story is more of a super-hero/crime framework, as the unlikely vigilante hero stumbles upon a conspiracy to make the battle he's been fighting into an unwinnable war. Remender has created a fascinating, if not entirely likely, world in Doll and Creature, and the story centers around one of the more interesting notions of that world, a drug called Grey Matter that transforms its users into bloodthirsty monsters called "Hydes." This drug has thrived in a culture where religion has been outlawed and goth culture has taken over, also a weird stretch as futurism goes but certainly unusual and imaginative.
What's interesting is that Remender doesn't really take a strong side in his story here, and his larger point seems to be that power lies with the individual, and that how indidivuals live their lives is what really matters. Certainly the abolition of religion is treated as a bad thing, but the Gipper and his GOP gang indicate that the right-wing religion that was abolished isn't really the answer either. In addition, the goth culture is presented as vapid and shallow, but there's no denying that there's a certain amount of cool in the monsterism and gothic trappings that our heroes have adopted.
On the art side of things, Doll and Creature is effective if unspectacular. Heebink and Manley capture the curvy feel of Doll, the angular rough-and-tumble look of Gristle and the freakish cyber-monster look of Modo, and they also provide some pretty impressive (and impressively splattery) combat sequences between Gristle and the Hydes. The art by Scott Cohn isn't quite as nuanced, but it keeps the same general tone and makes the somewhat cramped final sequence clear in storytelling. Overall, it's a book that looks pretty solid, although one can't help but be a little let down comparing it to the evocative painted cover by Dan Brereton, whose sensibilities seem ideally suited to this kind of project.
