The basic premise is that Doctor Baer collects cursed objects and tries to release any spirits contained in them. But an accident after Pickles and Taft stop by re-activates many of the cursed objects, which are then sent to the ends of the world. It's then up to Doctor Baer, Pickles, and Fleet to recover them before the greedy Lugubrious, who wants to harness the power for themself. However, on their quest, Doctor Baer begins to unerstand the true origins of the cursed object and he eventually comes to realize he had the wrong objective all along.
At its surface, the story is a pretty straight-forward good versus evil race to recover the MacGuffins. And while the quest is interesting enough and the periodic fight scenes are entertaining, what's much more striking to me is Baer's cultural journey. He flatly says early on that he's not an adventurer or anything like that; all of his work has an academic bent to it. He reads books, goes to libraries, studies journal articles, and so on. But when he comes into contact with some of these re-cursed artifacts, he finds that his research was flawed. The stories behind them were not what he expected them to be. He begins to see them in light of their original, cultural context and how they really came to be once you remove the biased suppositions his own culture might ascribe on top of them. I caught a bit online where Drozd called Baer a "reverse Indiana Jones" and I think that's a really interesting perspective to look at it. Baer's not shouting "It belongs in a museum!" He's saying, "It belongs with the society that created it in the first place!" Not quite as cinematically dramatic, but decidedly more ethical. That alone makes this a book worth checking out.
Drozd has been making comics for quite some time and that's evident in his storytelling. The book flows smoothly and there's never any question about what's going on, even when that includes weird, disembodied mists soaring about. The characters are all charming, and the interactions among them are all interesting to watch as they develop. I was a little distracted by the lettering of the blue mist's dialogue, though, admittedly. Drozd does an excellent job throughout the book utilizing the presentation of the lettering as part of the storytelling itself and that includes this blue mist character; but it's presented in a way to indicate a very unusual and halting speaking cadence that I didn't personally care for. (I was remined a bit of Jeff Bridges' performance in Starman, which I also didn't care for. Kind of a linguistic uncanny valley, if there is such a thing.) But the blue mist character doesn't speak much, so it's a non-issue for the vast majority of the book.
Overall, I really enjoyed it and I'm inclined to go back and read some of the earlier Boulder & Fleet stories just to get a more complete sense of the world Drozd has created. It's got the same sense of world-building and adventure and character that you might find in a Studio Ghibli film and -- perhaps because of the anthropomorphic characters -- I can easily see this being animated. And like many animated features, it's likely to be seen by many as a simple kids' story, but there's considerably more depth and characterization here that people might expect.
The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue came out earlier this month from Iron Circus and retails for $15.00 US.
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