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You know, given the fact that it took 3 weeks of running the Roomba on weekends before my personal dust field went into depletion, and also noticing that my asthma seems to have abated significantly, I'm beginning to think that weekly vacuuming is a must as long as I'm living in this place. This is probably better than my previous approach of never moving anything until there's a centimetre of dust on every surface.
So this is what Foo Swee Chin has been up to since Nightmares and Fairy Tales and various Neko Press comics. I had to read this about 3 times before I could make sufficient sense of it visually to comment on it in any useful way, but it's worth the trouble. I don't honour intercapitalized titles for just anyone. The initially nameless human protagonist finds herself without explanation on a train bound for the netherworld, which is odd because it's for people's unrealized ideas, as opposed to the people themselves.
Farllee (as her school ID has it) turns out to be somewhat excitable, not least because she's in a weird situation with no memory of her life before that, and ends up throttling her personal elf guide to death in the first few pages. This establishes an unfortunate pattern in her interactions with the other denizens of the afterthought-life, and she ends up at MuZz, the city of lost ideas, thoroughly exhausted, at the end of a trail of destruction which has disrupted the entire metaphysical system that surrounds the living human world. It rather reminds me of the setup exposited in Tavisha and Rikki Simons' Shutterbox series. If nothing else, the suggested Japanese pronounciation for the title is closer to "Muse".
Farllee's Hadean odyssey has its interesting aspects — Farllee has only one eye. Gee, what mythological figure does that remind me of? — but my favourite part is the interlude in MuZz, in the unusual household that has taken her in. It wasn't until after some curious dreams that I read it again and noticed that the one guy has more than the ordinary number of arms. Another fosterling is the furiously insecure Olive, who helps apprehend Farllee during her last rampage. The representative of dreamland who shows up has a superior air at first, but this attitude cracks decisively after she gets a close look at Farllee. During the ensuing commotion, Farllee wakes up and manages to be even creepier by being calm and rational.
When the art is comprehensible it's great, and when it's not comprehensible, it's usually still interesting to look at. As for the story, for my purposes it's another exploration of the idea of a world that's entirely created by the imagination, and you may not be surprised to find that it's a strange and terrible place.
