By Klaus Schönefeld & Ty Templeton (Vortex)
ISBN: 0-921451-02-4
The late 1980’s was a time of massive and unprecedented expansion and experimentation in the American comic industry. For a while it appeared that any clown with a Rotring and a couple of hundred bucks could bang out his own publication and become an overnight sensation.
Most of this burgeoning output was pretty damn bad, some actually appalling, and a small proportion was in fact, very, very good. However, not all of the Good Stuff hit big. Very little of it even survived the inevitable implosion. Such an item was Stig’s Inferno from Vortex Comics, a publisher who seemed to specialise in high quality product that nobody bought.
Stig is a cool, laid-back kind of guy who picks up a chick named Beatrice. He takes her back to his place, which is like a cross between the Bates Motel and Poltergeist Central. Whilst giving her the fifty-cent tour he gets into an argument with the sock stealing Things that are squatters in his piano.
When he regains consciousness he is in Hell, dead and naked from the waist down. What follows is a picaresque and brilliantly funny tribute to Dante’s Inferno with the voice of Bill Murray replacing Dante Alligheri’s and a mission to proffer mirth not salvation. Every page is a verbal and visual grab-bag of gags that never seem to progress the plot, but simply get funnier for fun’s sake.
The first five issues were published by Vortex with two more coming out from Eclipse Comics. The series never originally concluded, due in great part to the tragic and untimely death of Klaus Schönefeld. With Templeton being credited with story as well as art from the third instalment onwards and as he has proven himself such an entertaining writer and artist in the intervening years, it is this reviewer’s fervent hope that one day he returns to conclude the project. Nonetheless, what is there already is still wonderful, and you’ll thank yourself for picking any of it up next time you’re trawling the back issue bins.
© 1988 William P. Marks.