Horror comes in two varieties. The typical horror mode has the characters in a normal, reassuring world, and gradually a foreign, menacing element is introduced that doesn’t belong in the normal world. Works as diverse as Frankenstein and Halloween operate in this mode.
Another variety of horror is less typical. In this vein, the normal, reassuring world itself becomes subverted; everything we value has disappeared, and qualities like love and friendship are no longer possible. Think 1984, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Mike Birchall’s Everything is Fine is horror of the world-subverting variety. The characters Maggie and Sammy live in an orderly but bland suburban house. She is a housewife, he has a white-collar job meaninglessly moving products from point to point. Their relationship with each other and their neighbors are utterly drab and monotonous, with a few troubling details. The family dog is dead; and they sprinkle poison in their garbage to deter a homeless man from eating it.
What’s most disquieting about the characters is their appearance. Birchall at first keeps their heads out of frame to conceal them, but eventually gives the reader the first little shock by revealing that they have large oval heads that resemble the Hello Kitty character. As the story goes on, we come to know that these heads are actually masks that end at the neck line; a door slides open in their mouths when they eat. The heads are some kind of behavior control mechanism; a red light appears in one eye when a stressful situation occurs. For more serious offenses, the individual is “designated as red-status”— both eyes turn red, and horrible death occurs.
As the characters interact, the expressions on these masks never change from vapid, pleasant smiles. Birchall emphasizes this with frequent pauses in the conversations and closeups on the mask faces, forcing the reader to question the smiles and imagine the sad, troubled personalities that lie beneath.
The art and the aesthetic of this series reminds me of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library, which happens to be one of the most honored and respected works in the realm of print comics. Not prepared to say that Birchall is operating on that level, but it is a very good webcomic, one of the best I’ve seen. Nice to see as well that it has had 80 million page views and collected 1.3 million subscribers; a lot of people are being exposed to a finely-wrought and thought provoking webcomic.
