Beasts of Burden Won’t Weigh Down Your Eyes
Beasts of Burden got started as a collaboration between Evan Dorkin (Milk & Cheese) and Jill Thompson (Scary Godmother) for the anthologies The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings, Witchcraft, the Dead, and Monsters. The result? They won the Eisner Awards for Best Short Story and Best Painter categories. So I’m pleased to see that Dark Horse is working to publish an mini-series based on this initial appearance which is due to debut on September 16, 2009.
The plot of the series reminds me a great deal of the Secret of NIMH, except our heroes are dogs and cats instead of mice. Like NIMH our heroes can speak although they don’t waer clothing, and they co-exist in a world with humans. The story is set in Burden Hill where supernatural occurrences theaten the locals, so it’s up to our four legged friends to investigate the local forest to see what’s going on. I’ve only seen a few pages from the first book (shown below), but I already love the “frogs falling from the sky” which is a reference to Fortean literature:
Shown below is the cover of issue #2: In this adventure our gang of dogs is joined by a cat as they investigate other missing creatures from the hood:
Here’s the most recently released preview of the cover of issue #3 which features kitty going out on a solo mission, the shadows of the rats on this cover are a nice little creepy touch:
