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Josh Dysart and Ron Wimberly, The Stain. MySpace Darkhorse Presents, print vol 3. 2009. Online issue #15

Another nicely structured, satisfying story of eight pages from MDHP. God, I do love a good comics short story. Everyone is so into “graphic novels” these days (myself included, of course), that I fear this is a dying form. Anyway.

This appears to be a non-fiction story, or at least it presents itself as such. Dysart and Wimberly, along with Scott Allie, are invited to the campus of Ohio University, where a former insane asylum has been converted into graduate art studios. In an upper floor, yet unconverted, an inmate died and left…a reminder. Dysart is eager to see what he assumes will be a grisly treat for a horror writer. But the story takes a nice turn for the humanistic when they get there. The art is lovely, a bit dank, as one would hope for a story like this, and colored with watercolorey and zipatoney panache. As an aside, it’s funny that Wimberly depicts himself on his iPhone the entire time.

Full disclosure: Ron Wimberly is drawing my next graphic novel and I think pretty much whatever he does is great.

Age: teen. There is one very unsexual nude shot (with no actual naughty bits showing, of an imagined death scene of the woman), but otherwise it’s fine, and would probably be interesting, for kids as young as grades 5 or 6.