These days, when you pick up Sam Kieth's books, you know what you're getting into. It's going to be weird on a level that most people can't reach, but it's also going to have some very real human interaction holding the whole thing together, and that's true of Ojo, just as it has been of his past few projects. If the concepts he came up with weren't so bizarre, you could almost call his style formula by now, as you can count on his projects including monsters, female protagonists and human tragedy, but while Ojo has some similarities to Zero Girl and The Maxx, it is completely different in many other ways. In fact, the one thing I can definitely say about similarities between Ojo and Kieth's past work is that if you liked his prior work, you're going to like Ojo.
While Ojo is about a monster, the heart of the story is about a strange little girl, who serves as our narrator and as the main character of the story. Annie is heart-breaking in a lot of ways, because her simple and childlike worldview, which to some degree protects her from the pain of those who have died around her, also keeps her from really dealing with the subconscious elements of that pain. It's pretty clear from the way that Kieth writes Annie that her mother's death has deeply affected her, and that she handles that largely by being a little bit odd, and by trying to compensate by taking care of pets, which she doesn't seem capable of doing.
Because we see the story from Annie's point of view, we've got something of an unreliable view of the story. Kieth and Pardee use a sort of omniscient narrator (omniscient cameraman?) so that the art shows us the objective reality of what happened to Annie's previous pets, but the characters of Annie's sister and father are very much revealed through the lens that the young girl views them through. Her sister probably isn't as evil as Annie sees her (although Kieth does a pretty good job of making her the wicked sister of the piece), for example. Her father is more interesting, though, because even though Annie clearly doesn't understand it, Kieth and Pardee make clear the sadness that he's suppressing even as he tries to be a good father to his kids. He's a fascinating character, a good person but someone who is also obviously damaged and unable to fully deal with his pain and fix it.
Into this somewhat dysfunctional (but not broken) home, Kieth brings his trademark weirdness. Given that Kieth is so skilled at drawing weird monsters, I'm surprised that he kept the monster that Annie adopts mostly hidden for most of this issue. In fact, you almost can't tell what he's supposed to be at all, because he's defined mostly by the boards that he hides inside instead of by any visible characteristics. It's only when Annie has made her splint for the character that we really start to get a sense of its weird appearance.
Which brings up the art, and of course the art here is terrific. I wasn't sure how Keith's work would look in black and white, as he's always incorporated color so well, but as it turns out, the art on Ojo is some of the strongest I've seen from him. It's very compressed, using tons of panels on a page, and the result is that while it looks like Keith, it also reminds me of the hyper-kinetic work of Jhonen Vasquez or Roman Dirge, and given that this story will definitely appeal to the folks who like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Lenore, I think that's probably a good thing. Ojo mixes a set of characters who have known their share of tragedy with a touch of unknown magic, and the result is something very odd, but very, very readable as well.
