By John Mueller (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-590-0
From 1995 to 2000 budding artistic talent John Mueller produced a couple of miniseries for Kitchen Sink Press which became lost classics. Two decades later and now a far more seasoned creator, Mueller has returned to his first work, tinkering, tweaking and visually remastering it into an eye-popping painted saga of depravity, oppression, rebellion and survival for a new generation of fans.
The tale is brutally simple and begins in ‘Awakenings’ as a seasoned and unrepentant killer on Death Row unburdens himself to a concerned and devout cleric…
Once upon a time in a devastated, dystopian world, a slave in Public Slaughterhouse 628 began to think and to question. He wondered especially why the hogs he carved up for his and his masters’ nourishment looked so much like him and his fellow workers.
The crushing religious dogma and vicious punishments meted out by the Warden Superior and his cruelly bullying Angels offered no answers. Neither masters nor slaves had ever heard words like “gene-splicing†or “DNAâ€, which had worked arcane magic creating a separate species halfway between pigs and humans…
One day however, weary old worker Spigot screamed the questions Oink had painfully learned not to… and paid a terrible price…
In his dreams Oink had a vision of a god far different from the one he had been programmed to believe in. Realising he had been made as a cog in a horrible machine he took up his slaughter axe and decided to change his world one human at a time.
Of course he soon found ways to speed up the process – such as burning down the monstrous meat factory he was reared in…
‘Lies’ found him as the only subject of conversation in the houses of the unholy where the Warden ushers Judas and his savage posse the Angels of Mercy into the sanctum of the puissant Cardinal Bacaar. That formidable ecclesiastic is in every respect the creator and guiding light of this brutal existence…
As the rebel pig-man explores the world beyond the slaughterhouse he is soon cornered by the sadistic hunters, but the Angels have never faced a fugitive like Oink before and he quickly defeats and escapes them.
His flight takes him deep into the industrialised wasteland beyond church confines where he is taken in by an old woman named Mary and her hulking maimed and mute grandson Herbert.
She had been brutally blinded by the new regime but all their tactics haven’t robbed her of the memories of how the world used to be. She begins teaching Oink of the scientific travesties Cardinal Bacaar created, but neither the vengeful rebel nor Herbert are there when Judas and the Angels burst in and end her…
Pushed beyond all reason and tantalised by truths just out of reach, Oink – with the heartbroken Herbert at his side – determines to take the battle to the technological devil priest and liberate his own people from further horror in ‘Pigs’.
The suicide raid on the Cardinal’s Birthing Factory is ruthless and appallingly effective but it is only the penultimate step. There is still Bacaar to deal with and that can only end one way…
Harsh, barbarous, oppressive and Orwellian (as much Animal Farm as 1984), the slight narrative and familiar premise here is successfully bolstered by stunning artwork from Mueller, and this anniversary edition also includes his phenomenal ‘Oink Sketchbook’ featuring dozens of images over twelve pages of pencil drawings, painted roughs, panel details and more, plus ten further pig picture portraits in the ‘Oink Pin-up Gallery’ by Mueller, Tomoslav Torjanac, Justin “Coro†Kaufman, Mica Hendricks, Jason Minauro, Brett Parson and Nate Van Dyke.
© 1995, 2015 John Mueller. All rights reserved.