As a reviewer and a comics fan of many years, I've read a lot of comics that can be easily summed up in one sentence. Shuck is not one of those comics; in fact, it's quite odd, but there's something compelling about it as well. Basically, Shuck is about a demon who was a former soul collector, who now lives in a quiet little town. He's friends with a little girl from next door, he brews beer, he throws Halloween parties for the dead so they don't get into trouble and he hangs out with other gods and demons who walk the Earth as he does. He also laments the loss of his wife, Gaia, who sacrificed herself to save a grove of trees not so long so. Shuck seems to be some strange combination of Dante's Inferno and Song of the South, which sounds like an impossible blend but actually retains the charm of the latter and the intelligence of the former. Shuck is a stylish comic, with strange and beautiful artwork and a distinctive dialogue style that is not always easy to read, but which helps to give the book its unique charm.
Though the premise is not exactly simple or easily grasped, the stories certainly are. Shuck spends his time trying to keep friends out of trouble, or doing an unpleasant job to earn time with his wife, and though the circumstances surrounding these plots are unusual, the motivation at the heart of the story is easy to relate to. In addition, if you forgive his unusual appearance and sometimes maddeningly hard-to-understand affected speech, Shuck comes across as a likable, friendly, average guy. Indeed, the story which drives this graphic novel is mostly a man trying to shed his false faces and come to grips with his real self, which is the one that everyone really likes anyway. That this everyday metaphor is covered in the actuality of a demon who stops wearing masks doesn't make it any harder to relate to.
Actually, the concepts themselves contribute as much to the charm of the book as the dialogue. Shuck is a demon born of witches who used to collect souls for Satan but who now lives peacefully in a small town. Not your usual premise, and what impresses me is that Smith combines the weird with the mundane to make for an interesting read. Shuck has a style that can best be described as folksy. The dialogue, with its phonetic spellings and southern accents, is an unusual but fitting match with the strange world that Shuck and his friends inhabit. To be completely honest, I found it easier to swallow in issue-by-issue format than this book length, where the amount of concentration needed to work out what was being said became wearying. However, though the affected dialogue sometimes became a headache, I can't imagine the book without it.
In terms of artwork, Shuck diverts from the norm as well. In this collected edition, the yellowish paper is gone, and I found that the clarity gained on the artwork was worth the minor loss of a sort of faded, classic paper style. Smith's artwork features incredible use of grayshading, some imaginative designs and a distinctive look. The art has plenty of background detail and action, but it uses only a few lines to make it work. It's interesting that Smith uses simple shapes to convey so much meaning, whether it's the grotesque but still benevolent appearance of Shuck, the blind old man appearance of Cupid or the ugliness of the townsfolk with manifests their internal ugliness.
Shuck Unmasked completes the story begun in the Shuck issues with the equivalent of two more issues, a story that sees Shuck's true nature revealed to little girl Thursday Friday and Shuck himself having to engage in a couple of quests to find his true nature. These quests range from the mundane (having to work in a bookstore, after a delightfully funny notion of Hell having gone bankrupt and wiped out his retirement plan) to the more exotic (wandering the woods with the Hindu God Ganesha and remembering the details of his long and unusual life), but they all center on the importance of Shuck's mundane life, living in a very small town and sharing a friendship with a little girl that has father-daughter qualities to it.
