Amerotica
Reed Waller and Kate Worley with James Vance, creators
********** Mature Content Warning ************
Omaha the Cat Dancer is another one of those books I'd heard of before but really knew very little about. I'm not sure anymore where or how I first heard of the title. I remember seeing an add in 1989 for the Omaha statue that was being solicited. Maybe that was my first exposure to the character, but I think the name was at least a little familiar before then.
However I first heard of the title, I didn't see an issue of Omaha until much later. At one point, I'd purchased an earlier trade collection, I think The Collected Omaha vol. 3, and at another point I owned the first and third issues of Vol. 2 of the monthly comic, but I no longer have any of those in my collection.
Those issues gave me a taste of the series -- funny animal characters populate Omaha's world, but otherwise, they behave like ordinary people and often engage in explicit sexual behavior, which was fully depicted in the series.
I got to know some of the characters a little bit: Omaha, a stripper in a nightclub who is hiding out from someone or something; her boyfriend, Chuck, an artist who doesn't seem to work much because his family has money, but he wants little to do with them; their friend, Shelley, a former stripper who is now confined to a wheelchair; and everyone's sorta friend, Joanne, a former lover of Chuck's who fits into the mix in other ways that weren't clear to me at the time.
That was the problem with these random glimpses into the world of Omaha. Obviously, there was a continuing story from which I was missing vital pieces. The pictures were pretty to look at, but I couldn't really follow what was going on.
So, when I heard almost 10 years ago that the entire irregular run of Omaha was going to be collected, I decided to snap them up. The first seven volumes started coming out in 2005 and finished up in 2007, reprinting the various Omaha stories and shorts to that point. Finally, I could follow the story from the beginning, and learn a lot more about the creation process through introductions by each of the creators in the various volumes.
The initial episode featuring Omaha and Chuck was the brainchild of Reed Waller and appeared in a magazine called Vootie. Waller explains that his characters have animal faces and tails because illustrated people never look "natural" on a page. Those first two strips introduce Omaha's and Chuck's relationship. Also seen in those initial episodes, though not yet named, is George, the owner/manager at the Kitty Korner, the club where Omaha dances. The very first installment also introduces a major plot point in a moral decency campaign which threatens the Kitty Korner and Omaha's livelihood.
Kate Worley came to the series and took over the writing chores after those first two installments while Waller continued to supply the art. The story line backed up a bit at this point, showing Omaha first arriving in Mipple City looking to start over. That third installment introduces a still bipedal Shelley, and she and Omaha become fast friends. Soon other recurring characters are introduced including Jerry, Joanne, Pong and of course, Chuck.
The plot thread of the moral decency campaign is expanded into a full-blown conspiracy that will have major, ongoing ramifications for the characters and their world. Beyond the various interpersonal relationships among the various multi-generational characters, other plot points of this saga incorporate handicaps, substance abuse, blackmail, small-town graft, crime families and the culture wars. And the setting of the story switches from the fictional Mipple City, Minnesota, to San Francisco, California, and back again.
As the creators themselves admit in one of the introductions, Omaha is not a story for everyone. But I enjoyed the multi-layered storytelling and am glad I finally had a chance to read this series. At its best, the story reminds me of Terry Moore's work in Strangers In Paradise, another lengthy story I not long ago read for the first time in its entirety and enjoyed. (Moore provides the introduction to the sixth volume of this series, by the way.) There are many, many characters in a rich, twisting plot, and all of it is written well.
Some of the sex seemed overdone to me. And some parts of the finale to the series seemed a bit rushed. But then, the final volume of The Complete Omaha was produced 10 years after the series initially disappeared. Much of what happens in the finale was written or at least choreographed by Worley, but then completed by Waller and Vance after her death but with her blessing. Still, all in all, Omaha is a satisfying story about interesting characters in crazy circumstances.
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