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Released by: Dark Horse Comics
Released on: March 12, 2014
Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson team up again for this one-shot that serves as an excellent introduction to the series they created several years back: Basically, it's a pack of dogs and cats that defend their town of Burden Hill from paranormal problems.
Led by Emrys and Miranda, the dogs and cats - and a special witch-cat - discuss the latest problems to face them and what they need to do to combat it. Others doing that are luring a great monster out of the woods so they can destroy it. At first, Rex the dog is the bait but then he trades off Orphan the cat who then gets Ace the werewolf-dog to help. Ace nearly gets eaten by the beast but soon traps him into chasing him over a gap the beast can't cover and so he falls, impaling himself on sharp wooden ruins underneath him.
Crows descend on the corpse and steal away the eye that Dymphna, the witch-cat, was after. Many of the other dogs are less than impressed with her being witch-trained and that's clearly a strain on the group. But, having survived this encounter, the dogs head back to their human homes, the only one still reeling a bit being “weirdo Whitey,†who used to be just a happy dog but, now, having experienced what he has in other stories, is a bit messed up…
The dogs and cats spread the news back in town, with various animal types behaving as you'd expect them to, such as a pair of stuck-up pomeranians thinking all these troubles have been caused by the animals fighting them back. The crows, however, take the rare eye and lay it out as an offering to the rats, who reference their master and the ensuing plague they are to bring upon the world, much to the crows' delight…
What works best about Beasts of Burden is its straight-ahead approach to the storytelling combined with the peculiar idiosyncrasies of each animal type. Dorkin and Thompson don't shy away from the violence, either, giving the story a very useful emotional punch. Reading through this one-shot, it's very clear as to why they won the Eisner Award for their original series.
