Salome's Last Dance by Daria Tessler

When I have to make a random choice of what to read next, I try to ask "what looks weirdest." It's a metric that's served me well, since way back my freshman year of college, when I walked into Poughkeepsie's mighty Iron Vic Comics for the first time and walked out with a stack of new-to-me things that I'm pretty sure included Flaming Carrot, Cerebus, and Nexus.

So, when one graphic collection I was reading just wasn't working - it was no one's fault, but the PDF was a bit too low-rez for how many and tiny the words were on the pages - I needed to quickly shift and read something else right then.

And I'd looked at this book, in my library app, at least once, and thought "Well, that looks weird."

And it was. I have no regrets.

I don't know Daria Tessler's work; all I've read is, just now, her 2023 book Salome's Last Dance. She has a neat organic drawing style - I see a lot of varied cartooning influences in it, from gags (maybe Gahan Wilson? she at least has a similar sense of the grotesque) and undergrounds and just a bit of Wolverton (that grotesquerie again). She's clearly comfortable with the creepy and unnerving - look at that dancing dog on the cover, for a start, in the stripper heels and the totally-wrong two pasties (if a dog has pasties at all, which I am not willing to grant, it should have eight) and the cocked hips and the navel piercing.

The plot is something like a collision of the "But I am Pagliacci!" joke and the evil-brain-scientist horror trope. A depressed magician, Magnus, has a phantasmagorical show featuring the dancing dog on the cover - the villains call it a "puppet," but I'm not sure if we're supposed to believe they're right; it could be a "real" dog - and also goes to Dr. Silkini to deal with his depression.

Skilini and his minion instead plan to dive deep into Magnus's head - this is literal; aided by odd substances - and steal the secret of that dancing dog, Salome from the bizarre recesses of his mind.

It does not go quite as they expected, but, then, nothing in this book goes as anyone would expect - that's the wonder and joy of it. It's a short book, but a lot happens - a lot of weird action, a lot of visual eye-kicks, a lot of odd dialogue that all completely makes sense within this world. And Salome's dances are shown as gigantic, Busby Berkley-style extravaganzas, impossibly larger and more impressive than the stages they appear on - that's what makes Magnus a magician, I suppose.

I don't know what any of this means. I draw no solid conclusions. But this is a work of remarkable imaginative power and depth, engaging and amusing on the surface while having depths I'm sure I haven't come close to plumbing. It is deeply weird, and I'm sure I made the right choice.