Review: THE GODDAMN TRAGEDY Sends Shivers Through Your Bones

When talking about popular culture, it is quite easy—especially with a medium like comics—to put everything under a cozy label or fit it into a comfortable genre. You have standard superhero comics, science fiction adventures, tales of horror, the list goes on. But, in reality, nothing is ever that simple, and the most intriguing comics tend to straddle several genres and styles. One such example of this is Oni Press’ upcoming one-shot The Goddamn Tragedy by Chris Condon and Shawn Kuruneru. The comic novella, which features 48 pages, is an unsettling ghost story mixed with a territorial western. And so much more.

The story opens in San Francisco in 1894, with a lady walking into the office of Mr. J.M. Rapp, a writer of fiction and journalistic articles for national magazines. The lady is Ellen Janson, the central character in one of Rapp’s previous publications, and she has come to set the record straight. What follows is her first hand description of what occurred to her and her family 48 years earlier as they made their way across the country, through the wild mountains.

The initial set up is a standard western story of frontier people and the chase for the gold rush. The opening page features wooden housing, and characters dressed in long dresses and large brimmed hats. The silhouette of a horse walks across the foreground while a horse and carriage leaves the scene in the background. The first two panels are sketched onto the page in blocks of gray watercolour forming the images of city life. Negative space creates the sense of sunlight drying the street scene and, despite the muted colour, there is a warmth to the page: a stifling, dry, and dusty warmth. This is the first indication that there is going to be more to the story than at first you might presume, and little hints and motifs are peppered throughout the comic linking scenes and narrative threads together.

Before I continue, I have missed something crucial: the cover. If the opening scene sets up a classical western, then the cover screams traumatising horror. The blood red streaks painted across the full width of the cover with two wide, horrified eyes is unnerving enough, but then the ghostly face carved out of the central “A” like a jack-o-lantern ready for Halloween sends a shiver down your spine. To flip from cover to first page and back again is to create an unnerving contrast of both narrative and theme. Just like the movies Bone Tomahawk and High Plains Drifter, The Goddamn Tragedy is one thing disguised as another: It is a horror disguised as a western. There are glimpses in the first few pages, beyond the cover, that give you a clue, and as Ellen begins to tell her story, the narrative doubles down on laying the groundwork for the impending horror. But before you get there, writer Chris Condon and artist Shawn Kuruneru are going to embed you in the Janson family’s life.

The first few pages of Ellen’s story are open and bright, with Kuruneru using very pale colour washes for the background, meaning that they almost blend with the gutters on the page. The lack of bold panel frames is more at home in a memoir comic, where true events unfold, and that lends itself perfectly to this comic. The setup challenges the contrast between truth and fiction. Rapp’s original story was a lie, we are told by Ellen, but we have not seen or heard any of it. We are then given the true story with no frame of reference, but instinctively a narrative is created in our minds. The concept of legends and western myths isn’t new to us, the audience, so when the character in this story insists on telling us the truth, we conjure up this wild, outrageous horror story and prepare for any supernatural elements to be explained. But Chris Condon is smarter than that. The tables are turned and we are presented with a western comic closer in style to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. There is an open dissertation on the traumas of family life, and the relationship between Ellen, her mother, and her father is explored, warts and all. There is even an element of survivor’s guilt from Ellen, and this is explored as well through the telling of her tale. Those beautifully painted setup pages pull you so deeply into the lives of the Janson family that their trauma becomes yours. Even as you fight against the decisions that are made by several characters, there is no way you can change their fate, unless you close the comic and stop reading. Suddenly you have become the scream queen running up the stairs instead of out the front door.

Kuruneru takes the reader on a dangerous journey, away from the safety of numbers and into the wild west. But the wide, dusty landscapes often associated with the western are replaced by wooded mountains and snowy nights. Kuruneru’s visuals are mesmerising and the snowstorm scene is a triumph of disorientation and panic. This scene is only topped, visually, by the creepy night sequences which contain such a depth of colour. It is at these moments that the comic becomes its most macabre, with one page packed with more tension than anything I’ve read in a comic since Negan played baseball with Glenn’s head. Kuruneru captures the out of control emotions of his characters perfectly, making you believe for a moment that anything, no matter how horrible, could happen.

There are many layers to The Goddamn Tragedy. The narrative weaves different genres together creating a wondrous tapestry of a story, brimming with visual tropes that never pass over into cliche. Then stitched into this are a handful of themes, some more obvious than others, some directly linked to the story, while others make statements about different genres and mediums. It is truly a comic that contains something for everyone. Personally, the most impressive aspect of the comic is how it challenges the conceits of biographical comics. The Goddamn Tragedy adopts the visual styles of biographical comics, with white pages, no panel borders, a voiceover narrative, and a more traditional art style. The story has a subjective view, one that the audience is told at the outset is the truth, and we don’t have anything to contradict this, except for an off hand remark made by the writer Rapp. The comic is emotional and deals with some traumatic experiences, and not the kind you might be expecting, but the validity of the tale can still be questioned. Whether we should question it or not is up to us, but the challenge is there, set by writer Chris Condon. Ellen tells us of scenes she wasn’t witness to, incidents she learned second hand. All of this feeds back into the myth making of the comic and the concept of legends that is inferred from the opening.

Chris Condon and Shawn Kuruneru tell a magnificent story. The artwork is dreamlike and shifts so easily into the stuff of nightmares, but not the schlock horrors of EC’s rebirth, but almost folk horror in nature instead, with a disturbing touch of the psychological. I once again refer to Kubick’s The Shining as that is what the themes of this comic remind me of the most. There is an encroaching terror that builds up through the pages and, as the characters’ mental states begin to waver, so does the safety of the narrative. At times it’s as brutal as the modern television westerns such as the Yellowstone prequel 1883. At other times it captures the unimaginable beauty of the landscape as well as Greg Ruth does in Indeh. Horror comics are currently in vogue, and there are plenty currently on the shelf, but very few match the adrenaline rush produced by this intoxicating page turner.