The Lobster Dance

Today we have a guest post from Kathryn Hemmann, whom you may know from our collaborative panels on shôjo manga/anime, about the queer horror comic Nico’s Fortune.

The short stand-alone comic Nico’s Fortune is a collaboration between American writer Ryan King and Malaysian artist Daryl Toh. This is their second project together after the disturbing and eerie comic The Games We Played, which was published in October 2016. Nico’s Fortune is still plenty creepy, but the attention it devotes to the inner lives of its two protagonists serves to heighten its emotional impact while rendering its gruesome climax all the more shocking.

At the center of the story is a newly married couple who have just moved into their first house together. Laura works at an office, while Beth is an artist who paints in her studio at home. To add flair to their living room, the two women hang a cuckoo clock that they found abandoned by the side of the road. This odd fixture makes its way into the kitchen and then into the bedroom, where it hangs in full view of their bed.

Meanwhile, the couple’s cat Nico begins to exhibit strange behaviors, and the loud parties thrown at frat house across the street have started to get on Beth’s nerves. The two women respond by taking Nico to the vet and calling the cops with a noise complaint, but the frat retaliates. It turns out that the cuckoo clock is indeed sinister, and Nico’s odd behavior only grows weirder. By the time Beth is provoked into venturing into the house across the street, it’s clear to the reader that something is terribly wrong.     

Beth, at her easel, on the phone with her mother. “Dental school?! There’s no way, Mom… Because. Oh he does, does he? Laura’s actually working overtime, so I—“

Although Nico’s Fortune is only forty pages long, there are muted flashes of unease that occasionally illuminate a larger ongoing story. For example, the reader is shown a brief glimpse of Beth in the middle of a call with her mother, who suggests that she go to dental school, thereby insinuating that she doesn’t agree with Beth’s life choices. A few pages later, Nico knocks over a can of paint and ruins one of Beth’s canvases. She sits on the floor and cries, hinting at a more pervasive sense of frustration. Toward the beginning of the story, Beth says that there should be no secrets between her and Laura; and, although her words seem to be light and teasing, Laura’s face suggests that there may be a deeper history of secrets between them.

Image: Beth crying in her studio after Nico the cat destroys a painting.

The strange and awkward gender politics of horror have become such a pervasive theme that they’ve come to be treated as almost a convention of the genre, so it’s refreshing to be able to read such an original and carefully crafted story in which the female protagonists act and react like regular people who have lives outside of the abnormal situation in which they’ve found themselves. Meanwhile, aggressive and toxic masculinity is referenced and subverted, with the horror of the story becoming much larger than a bunch of obnoxious young men. No one is characterized by their gender, and it’s taken for granted that Beth and Laura are married and have an relationship that is depicted as neither idealized or pathological.

Beth approaches the frat house across the street. She says, “Al’right, dickends. Let’s see what you got.” Nico the cat responds “Mrow?”

King’s writing is subtle and clever, while Toh’s art creates a marvelous sense of atmosphere in which shadows are dark and looming and the lighting is always dramatic. Together they have created a haunted house story that works perfectly without ever resorting to the sort of highly gendered roles that often appear in stories about houses and hauntings. The adult female characters of Nico’s Fortune are relatable, its green-tinged color palette is gorgeous, and the comic contains a number of truly awful cat puns that will make you scream in horror.    

Nico’s Fortune was successfully funded as a Kickstarter project, and you can order copies at Ryan King’s online store.  

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Kathryn Hemmann teaches classes about fiction, comics, and video games at George Mason University, and she blogs about books at Contemporary Japanese Literature.