I've heard some folks talking about Milkman Murders and how it was a disturbing portrayal of suburban dysfunction, so I guess I was sort of expecting something a little more... out there? Which seems odd to say, given that Casey has given us an abusive husband, an animal-mutilating son and a promiscuous daughter in this family of four, but maybe after reading enough Joe Lansdale and Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis and others, this sort of thing just came off as a touch predictable for me. However, while there weren't as many shocks as I expected, I can't deny that there's a sort of horrific fascination to Casey's script, that I'm curious to find out what the deal is with the enigmatic figure who makes his appearance on the final page and that Steve Parkhouse's art is very engaging as well.
Casey's story is about peeling off the veneer of suburban normality and revealing the twisted reality beneath it. This kind of thing has been done so many times at this point that I wonder if I was the only person who actually lived in normal suburbs growing up, and everyone else had robotic perfect wives, serial-killing moms and wife-swapping satanists for neighbors. Which is to say that the shock factor has gone out to some extent. While I might not find this stuff shocking from a "surprise!" point of view, however, Casey does give it a sense of creeping horror that is pretty effective. The scene of the son's animal dissection lab, in addition to hitting one of my personal hot buttons for horror, is just a creepy and terrifying scene that speaks volumes, for example.
Probably the reason that the horror element works, however, is because of our point-of-view character, Barb, the housewife who imagines her life as something out of a '50s sitcom. Her attempts to make a happy life for her family are met with a series of gut punches, from her abusive husband to her bratty son to her unbelievably spoiled daughter. When the reader finds out what her son and daughter and husband are up to, it's hard not to feel for Barb, for whom these crushing blows are just more and more steps on her dream of a life of perfect marriage with kids. It seems fairly likely that Barb herself is going to snap during the course of this story, although who knows what the sour milk and the milkman have to do with anything at this point.
Steve Parkhouse is a name I'm vaguely familiar with, but whose work I haven't seen in any great volume. However, Parkhouse's artwork on Milkman Murders is terrific, exaggerated but very tightly controlled, reminding me of a cross between the work of Guy Davis and the work of Kyle Baker. Parkhouse also brings a sense of the real to the work, such that the abuse of Barb's husband feels particularly brutal, or the affair between the daughter and her teacher particularly sordid, and the notion of having a stranger come in your home is always unsettling, but the slovenly, dangerous look of the visitor at the end of the issue crosses that line into almost terrifying territory.
Milkman Murders has a foundation that is a touch on the familiar side for me, but the execution is solid, and I'm certainly intrigued to see where the story goes from here. At any rate, whether suburban dysfunction is familiar or not, Casey and Parkhouse do a great job of making it seem thoroughly unsettling and horrifying.
