WILL THE FETUS BE ABORTED? BY AND BY LORD, BY AND BY: I just got the second installment of Alphonse: "Murder Sleep."

Alphonse is a horror comic about a fetus who survives abortion; he knows, and thinks, and hates. My review of the first issue is here.

The cover of this second installment tells the story. A broken doll sits in horrifying suspense in front of the inevitable revenge: a carving-knife. All my Pet Sematary terror-feelers started tinglin'.

Alphonse continues to complicate the categories of abortion-horror I talked about here. It's baby-horror and grief-horror at once--almost as if both sides had a point!

The art is lumpensympathetic. The grays are used to suggest a world of complicity and fog and nightmare. There are some well-chosen, sharp echo images: The light gleams and breaks against the ice in a glass of scotch the way it breaks against the display window of a cell phone. The overall aesthetic is a wash of gray with sharp black character-defining lines coming out of the quicksand.

The actual storyline is hard for me. This is the second installment, thus we're getting more pieces on the chessboard; and I guess I don't care yet about the new pieces. There are suddenly mafiosi (yes, with heavy irony and a pet white cat, but still) and some kind of conspiracy plot. This seems more... comic-booky, and you know what I mean even if you want to be defensive... than the basic wrongful-birth plot. So far I'm okay with the comedy-horror of the conspiracists, but I wish we had more sympathy for them. The first issue of Alphonse was striking in large part because of its relentless focus on suffering and complicity: No one was exempt from its punishing storyline. This issue, again solely because the conspiracy tropes are hit so hard, seems to exempt its audience from some of its horror. Not all the horror, by any means--the pro-life girl and guy are still really messed-up, and their dialogue is well-balanced and gives a real sense of how people suddenly dropped into an impossible, perhaps miraculous but also horrifying, situation might respond. But this issue seemed to have "villains" in a way which the first one didn't.

It's impossible to talk about this comic without talking about abortion. I think the first installment was less-polarized than this one. Nonetheless I think this comic understands the terror of pregnancy and childbearing. So far, I'm not sure this comic will work--especially if it goes too far in the conspiracy direction, which is what soured me on Human Target, since I honestly think conspiracy stories are the opposite of complicity--you don't do conspiracy stories unless you think no one would ever do bad if they knew they were wrong.

But so far, I'd strongly recommend Alphonse to every horror-comics fan who doesn't immediately reject it based on the subject matter. That isn't a criticism. The politics of abortion are intrinsic to the story. There are at least a hundred reasons you wouldn't want to read a comic in which that was a plot element. So far, though, I--as a pro-life Cat'lick dyke, who has never been in danger of pregnancy in all her ramblin' life--think this comic is presented without sentiment, with sympathy for those who support abortion rights, and with... it's hard to tell because of the particular storyline... but with at least some sympathy for women who abort. I think if you can read Alphonse as a story about abortion it makes sense; I don't know if it makes as much sense if you read it as a story of one woman's abortion. But the narrative hints that we will learn much more about Alphonse's unwilling mother, and if that happens, I think it will go a long way to addressing my uncertainty about this approach.

Highly recommended; despite my qualms, I have to admit that nobody else is doing this, and someone should be. If you read this blog, you may be the sort of person who wants to support Catholic arts! This is a great way to do so!

UMBERT THE UNHEIMLICH: If you spend a lot of time in Cat'lick pro-life circles, you may well run across a cartoon strip called "Umbert the Unborn." In this thing, a charmin' little guy hangs out in his (never-pictured) mother's womb, offering uplifting folk wisdom about the funny little things in life.

You... can probably tell from that description that this strip is way too Bil Keane for me to understand its virtues. Apparently at least one other pro-life Catholic has found the premise of this strip intensely creepy.

Matthew Lickona's Alphonse features a similarly-sentient fetus. But Alphonse is vividly aware of his utter helplessness--not as a political contingency but as an existential threat. His mother wants to kill him. And she would succeed... except that Alphonse, in a horrific freak occurence, survives and crawls away.

This is a horror comic which simultaneously exploits and transcends the abortion-horror storylines I talked about here. The comic relies on the flesh-creeping, Uncanny Valley nature of the late-term fetus in order to get its effects--yet, unlike most other horror-baby works, it treats the creature as a person: a monster like Frankenstein's, a bloodied self whose individuality is real, not purely symbolic. And Alphonse's would-be savior herself must break ethical boundaries in order to do what she thinks she has to do to preserve his life. We get trapped in spirals of wrong actions, and when you get down low enough it's hard to see a clean way out.

(The fact that the comic never states explicitly that that's the very reason many women abort is one of its many signs of respect for its audience. There are several parallels between the would-be abortive mother and the would-be baby-saver, but they're done quietly, not stridently.)

The artwork is gritty but not awkward, by an artist who's worked in mainstream comics (WildStorm and maybe something else?) and who uses fairly standard contemporary Western comics techniques clearly and well. The art basically doesn't get in the way, though it also won't be the reason you buy the comic. The figures, gestures, "camera angles," and pacing are all unobtrusively well-chosen. (The women, by the way, look like individual women--indie comics usually do a lot better about this than superhero titles, but I still thought I should mention it.)

I don't know to what extent I can recommend this title yet, since I've only seen the first issue. It's the sort of thing where the premise might be much better than the denouement. But if you think this sounds worth trying, do check it out. I'll say that it does pummel you emotionally, but not ideologically. I'm excited to see where this story goes. Lickona's website might be the best place to order it.