45 Days Of CCS, #30: Emil O'Melia

Emil O'Melia's The King Of Cats Is Dead is a beautiful, surreal, nightmarish, and colorful saga about a demonic cat named Spider who steals the soul of the King of Cats upon his death. This comic is truly a tour-de-force when it comes to combining deeply powerful & meaningful color with a strong use of line and spotting blacks. While it's a pleasure to just look at this comic, O'Melia uses a propulsive storytelling style with excellent panel-to-panel and page-to-page transitions. The story follows Spider as well as the Prince of Cats, who was supposed to ascend to the throne. 

Spider has to outwit and outlast hordes of followers in order to deliver the soul he devoured to some kind of demonic cat overlord. It's clearly a decision he starts to regret once he's done it, but there's no going back now. At the same time, the Prince delays a search party for increasingly vague reasons, until he declares he no longer intends to be king. This mini does not feature the conclusion of the story, but it's so beautifully made and with such attention to detail that hopefully it will be finished soon. 

Haunted Bathrooms is self-described as "a horror-poetry-comics chapbook," and that's about right. The mix of illustrated text, splotchy paintings, emo horror figures, and a stunningly sad story called "$950 Toilet" about the realities of exploitation under capitalism. The image of "renting a few hundred cubic feet...floating" is such a stark one, and the watercolors here add to the blunt starkness of this realization. "The Men's Room" captures a different kind of horror--the fear of one's own gender expression being literally illegal and impeding a basic human function. O'Melia's skill with color and having the right vehicle for expressing it has really led to them levelling up.