Worry Doll

By Matt Coyle (Dover Comics & Graphic Novels)
ISBN: 978-0-486-80616-7

In the comics biz it’s not too often that something truly different, graphically outstanding and able to subvert or redirect the medium’s established forms comes along.

Sadly, when it does we usually ignore it whilst whining that there’s nothing fresh or new in view.

That’s pretty much what happened with Matt Coyle’s astounding Worry Doll when, after six years of work on the dark epic, it was published by Mam Tor in 2007 and sank from the collective audience’s sight after causing but the barest of ripples.

To be fair, British-born, Australia-based Coyle (see also, if you can, his mordant, socio-political satire Registry of Death) did win the 2007 Rue Morgue award for Best Comic Book Artist for his incredible photo-realistic line-art on Worry Doll, but the innovative delivery of one of the creepiest tales in comics history never garnered the acclaim it deserved in our superhero-saturated toy, TV and film license-loaded entertainment arena.

Now, thanks once again to Dover Books’ Comics & Graphic Novels division, another lost classic of the art form has a second chance to shine, so let’s show some proper respect and make this edition the popular success it should be…

A soft-cover monochrome landscape affair; enigmatic observations and conversations are delivered in the oldest format of pictorial narrative, with blocks of text on one page balanced by an illustrated panel or sequence of images on the facing folio, as a most distressing story unfolds…

A happy home becomes a charnel scene of slaughter and in the aftermath, amidst the bloody remains of a recently-despatched family, a trio of beloved mannequins intended to assuage anxiety take on ghastly animation and leave in search of answers – or is it actually just different questions?

Making their way across familiarly picturesque and simultaneously terrifying country, the dolls increasingly depend on the kindness of strangers, until their nightmare road-trip is eventually subsumed in someone’s story. As our perspective shifts, we get clues that other hands are working these puppets and the story is not as it seems nor quite done yet…  

Spooky and subversive, blending classic noir mood and tone with storybook quests and psychologically daunting introspection, Worry Doll operates on multiple layers of revelation, both in the staggeringly detailed illustration and the prose accompaniment; constantly offering hints and forebodings if not answers…

With a new Foreword from comics author and filmmaker Shaun Tan (The Lost Thing, The Red Tree, The Arrival) who sagely deconstructs the journey and Coyle’s virtuosity with line and form, this is a complex, engaging and ominously beautiful masterwork no true lover of comics or addict of sinister suspense can afford to miss.
© 2007 by Matthew Coyle. Foreword © 2016 by Shaun Tan. All rights reserved.