Creature Tech

Set in Turlock, Calif., a town TenNapel grew up near, this book is a farcical, sci-fi good-versus-evil yarn that manages to explore theology, alienation and social acceptance in a small community. It's the story of the battle between the abrasive good-guy scientist Dr. Ong and the resurrected Dr. Jameson, a malevolent 19th-century occultist/mad scientist who sought to rule the world. Ong (a child science prodigy and Turlock native) returns to his hometown after being appointed to direct a research facility locals call Creature Tech. There, he opens a crate housing the Shroud of Turin. Things get complicated when the ghost of Jameson (he was killed during a fiendish experiment) steals the shroud, resurrects his own body and resumes trying to take over the world with the help of an army of conjured hellcats and a gigantic space eel. Ong pursues Jameson while simultaneously acquiring a symbiotic alien parasite (it's alive and acts like a kind of leech sidekick), falling in love with gloomy Katie and galvanizing a town of rednecks to fight Jameson's horde of demon hellcats. TenNapel's creativity and attention to detail fill this book with pleasant surprises and entertaining twists. His b&w drawings are dynamic, comic and often startlingly touching. The images of Katie, Ong's sweetie, emerging from her comic but awkward shell are powerful, and TenNapel deftly surveys the complexities of social alienation in a format primarily intended to be nonsensical. This work is slapstick funny, strangely sensitive and well worth reading.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Out in Turlock, California, all hell breaks loose when a mad scientist's spirit opens one of the crates of top-secret stuff at the Research Technical Institute, aka Creature Tech because of rumors, essentially correct, about what sort of things go on there. Dr. Michael Ong, teenage Nobel laureate and the institute's chief, grapples with the slugbeast the spirit releases--successfully, thanks to a salt cellar--but the symbiont that powers the thing latches onto him. Now he has two insectoid arms and lots of extra oomph, which come in handy fighting the cat monsters the spirit throws at him while scheming to use the shroud of Turin to revive the humongous space eel buried under Turlock's terrain. If this sounds like some overactive big-critter horror movie a la The Blob --hey, those flicks should ever be this good! Graphic novelist TenNapel has already won an Eisner award (the comics equivalent of sf's Hugo and mystery's Edgar), and his goofy, kinetic style (quite reminiscent of Will Eisner's) makes a winner out of this crazed romp. Ray Olson
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