Image Comics
Todd Dezago, writer
Craig Rousseau, Lauren Monardo Gramprey, Matt Wieringo, Eric Henson, Matthew Dow Smith and Christian D. Leaf, artists
This is a quirky little book that comes out in limited series form every once in a while and then disappears for a bit. There have been three multi-issue minis, all later collected in trades, and several stand-alone issues and one-shots before this series. The first two minis and trades -- First Blood and Second Chances -- were under the Dark Horse imprint before Todd Dezago and Craig Rousseau moved their creation to Image Comics.
I think a series of limited series is preferable to an ongoing monthly in some cases, especially when the character is not as well-known or established or the creators need more time between story arcs. Tell the story you have in mind and then stop until you have another idea or more books in the can. It doesn't work quite so smoothly for this series, however, because the title is told as if it was an ongoing. Take the end of this five-issue mini, for example. As the title implies, much of the action in these issues takes place in Australia. Technically, at the end of issue five, none of the characters is still in Australia, and I very much doubt that they will be returning there any time soon. However, the situation that took them to Australia is not yet resolved. In fact, a pretty major plot thread left dangling by the third mini, Triangle, is not advanced in this fourth mini until the very last page, and it is really more of a teaser of things to come than a resolution. So the story is very much an ongoing.
To further confuse things a little bit, if you are buying Perhapanauts in singles, each issue contains two or three stories -- the main, and one or two backups, often by other artists to give main artist and co-creator Rousseau a break, I assume. Sometimes those backup stories serve to expand on some detail in the main story, but other times they might be a completely separate tale with no relation whatsoever to the main. That can get even more confusing if you're reading the series in trade and have to figure out why these side-trip stories are placed in between chapters of the main story.
Once you get used to those idiosyncrasies of Dezago's writing, however, this is a very fun read filled with colorful characters. There are five main characters when the Perhapanauts series starts out, all agents of a secret organization named BEDLAM, the Bureau of Extra-Dimensional Liabilities and Management. Arisa is the leader of Blue Team and a psychic. There's also Molly, a teenage ghost; Choopie, a video-game playing, blood-sucking chupacabra; Big, a genetically enhanced sasquatch; and MG, the enigma of the group about whom little is known. There is also a Red Team led by an ex-Marine named Peter Hammerskold. Other members of Red Team include the Merrow, a sea sprite, and Karl, a mothman able to instill fear. There are also multiple BEDLAM bases around the world, so other agents may show up from time to time, many of them human, but certainly not all of them.
So what exactly does BEDLAM do? They track down things that have accidentally or by design arrived in our world from other planes of existence, be they alternate universes, parallel dimensions or simple tears in the fabric of reality. So the reader never quite knows what Dezago and Rousseau are going to throw at the Perhapanauts. So far they've crossed paths with cryptids you might have heard of such as gremlins, the Jersey Devil and even Karl's people, the mothmen. But there have also been a number of other scary things like a chimaera, an aswang, a tatzel wurm, the Dover Demon and a growtch.
If you are interested in the bizarre and enjoy some humor mixed liberally with your drama, this is a book you should check out.
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