Writer/Artist: Douglas Paskiewicz
Collecting stories from ARSENIC LULLABY #1-14.
Price: $18.99
Publisher: AAA Milwaukee Comics

I first encountered ARSENIC LULLABY creator Douglas Paskiewicz at the 2001 Heroes Convention in Charlotte. He was a wiry, bald man with a wisp of a beard, glasses and more energy than everyone else at the convention put together. I was doing a humour column at PopImage at the time, and wanted a piece of art for a column than involved a ruler-slapping nun. Paskiewicz was more than game to do some art, but absolutely refused to do that piece. "I can't," he said. "It's immoral."

Slightly confused, I then asked him to do a piece for another column, this one involving a psychotic fanboy graphically disembowelling a rival. "Coming right up," he said. While he was drawing it, I asked if he'd add in a torn-off scrotum. "No problem," he said with a smile, and doodled it in without a second thought.

That should tell you a few things about Douglas Paskiewicz.

First, it should tell you that for all the many, many, many, many sick, twisted, horrible and amoral things that go down in the first two collections of ARESENIC LULLABY, he is at heart possessed of some kind of grounded morality.

The second thing it should tell you is that that boy ain't right.

ARESENIC LULLABY is currently in two collections entitled THE DEVIL YOUR NEIGHBOR and APATHY FOR THE DEVIL, which have been compiled/edited into a "Best Of" volume called THE DEVIL'S HAT TRICK. It is the kind of comic that's best described as SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE as written by SOUTH PARK creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. That's something of an understatement, actually. SOUTH PARK did an episode last season satirising the stem cell controversy through a parody of Brian's Song, but got through countless jokes about abortion without showing a single foetus.

In ARSENIC LULLABY, they're all over the place. Don't take my word for it - just got to arseniclullabies.com and click on them. They're right there, in all their bloody red glory.

The foetuses are the soldiers of Voodoo Joe. Joe has been cursed for some reason or another, so he not only has an ugly voodoo mask stuck on his face, he has to constantly wreak horrible vengeance on other people to keep his curse from worsening.

Thankfully, there are plenty of people who need revenge. Like Merl, the committed pacifist whose beliefs repeatedly get him beaten up. Or little Chad, who blackmails Joe into getting rid of his parents for a week so Joe can supplant them as the drunken, abusive parent he's never had. It'll help him fit in with all the other kids in school.

Not that Joe's even the most disturbing figure in the book (even if he does spend two eight-panel pages doing nothing but beating a man to death with a lead pipe). No, that credit could very well go to Edgar Breyers.

Edgar, you see, is a census agent. It's his job to make sure the US census stays consistent until a new one can be taken. So Edward does this by killing off anyone who places the census off by one. These people are babies. And the deaths have to look like accidents, so Edgar has to find lots and lots of ways to kill lots and lots of babies. He has to make it look like an accident, so there's scalding, shaking, chewing beef jerky and blowing it down a baby's throat...

And there are still other strips, like "Dottie and Liquid Sam", a domestic drama about a scientist reduced to a depressed puddle in a jar and his remarkably ineffectual wife...

Or the Clot, the Man With No Skin...

Or the hideous reason why birds don't nurse...

Or the Klansmen who have to deal with competition in mattresses, or the suicidal ex-monster-under-the-bed...

And, of course, there's the foetuses.

There's no avoiding them. They're everywhere, all over the book, including the covers of the trades, staring at the reader with their empty, zombified eyes. Voodoo Joe resurrects them from the dumpsters of free clinics and keeps them in his crisper until he needs them. They can climb in most anywhere, really. And they'll stay there until Joe says different, no matter how many ways you find to get rid of them...

Is there a point to all this? Is there some redeeming message buried in all this horrible mess? Is this nothing but dementia but dementia's sake?

To answer: No, no and fuck no.

ARSENIC LULLABY is a book where you laugh, then want to hit yourself for laughing. It creates a world where disgusting, reprehensible behaviour is committed on every last page...and it makes you identify with it. Let's face it - who hasn't wanted to enact some kind of violent revenge on a griping boss or an unfaithful ex-partner? Who doesn't take some kind of perverse pleasure in seeing cute cartoon babies die horrible deaths? And who hasn't wanted to laugh at a poor bastard with no skin?

However, Paskiewicz doesn't make it easy for the reader. We're constantly reminded that yeah, these are innocent babies that are dying, yeah, revenge is ultimately hollow, yeah, these characters have the vaguest sense of morality, they know they're making the wrong choices. Then they go and do something like dismember a four-year-old anyway.

Anyone reading ARSENIC LULLBY will be asking themselves one question over and over: "Oh God, why did I just laugh at that?" You're placed within the mindset of a man who wonders what if Anne Frank wasn't really Jewish; a man who has a character make a meal of a mermaid's lower half; a man who regularly prefaces each issue with the maxim "GOD BLESS RONALD REAGAN". You're in the mind of someone who's horrified at the thought of a slap-happy nun, but thinks nothing of a torn-off scrotum.

You're in the mind of Douglas Paskiewicz. You're in the mind of a boy who ain't right.

Enter at your own risk.

Zack Smith is a writer and journalist.

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