It's not an exaggeration to say that Carol Lay has had one of the weirder careers in comics that I can recall. She started her career at the dawn of the Alternative Comics era, doing shorts for Weirdo and Wimmen's Comics as well as commercial work for DC & Western. In between working in animation and doing storyboards for Hollywood, she was one of the more successful cartoonists in the alt-weekly newspaper industry with Story Minute (later WayLay). Her Irene Van Der Camp strips in Fantagraphics' Good Girls comic were later collected, as well as her short strips. She did a memoir about weight loss, did Simpsons strips for Bongo Comics, and self-published a number of short comics. While she does a lot of comedic work, she's not strictly a humorist. In fact, I'd say her defining characteristic is that it's hard to define her work.
Her Murderburg (originally Murderville) comics were originally published as individual issues via Kickstarter, and Fantagraphics Underground published a collection of them. These are in the vein of her "Irene" strips: funny, highly stylized, weird, and violent. While Lay's introduction details the publishing history of the Scazzo family, there's nothing that actually explains the presence, making the first couple of stories confusing. The diminutive, fire hydrant-shaped family patriarch Leo Scazzo, with his purple suit and pencil mustache, feels like a tribute (if not a direct reference to) Gomez Addams. Indeed, with the three children and Leo's willowy spouse Antonia, along with assorted references to violence and mayhem, it seemed obvious that this was a Charles Addams pastiche.
Except it's not. This is a goof on mob cliches, with Leo Scazzo being a semi-retired mob boss who has become mayor of Muderburg, a small Maine island community. Everyone on the island has their own shady behavior that they're up to, but things are kept in the family, so to speak. Lay mashes up the island weirdo cliche with mob tropes for humorous effect, even as the personalities of the main characters do have a lot of Addams tendencies. While Leo, Antonia, and their "normal" daughter Isabella are somewhat amusing (if limited) characters, the real fun is in the weirdness of the island itself. Whether it's a mysterious, all-devouring fog, a phony artist, assorted assassins, or the annoying snobs on a nearby island who drop their garbage on Muderburg via hot air balloon, Lay excels at coming up with absurd comedic premises. The characters themselves are all rather static, which is fine because they exist to provide a structure to hang jokes on. The episodic quality of the stories makes it feel like a demented, modern version of a Harvey comic, which isn't surprising for someone who worked on the Simpsons comics. Lay's character design befits the comedic nature of the strip, and her pen-and-ink compositions are so sharp that I wish the whole thing had been in black & white. Her lettering has always been a strong point of her work as well; it's dynamic, crisp, and clear.
Lay's newest work is technically her first original graphic novel. Entitled My Time Machine, it's a genre-bending story. It's technically a sequel of sorts to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, but it's also a memoir of sorts, and it's also a polemic. The protagonist is Lay herself, who tries to duplicate and expand upon the adventures of Wells' nameless Time Traveler in a world where the book depicted true events. Lay is an artist whose history of primarily doing short stories means that she's used to getting to the point with some alacrity, so it's interesting to see such a languid sense of pacing in this book. The plot follows Lay volunteering to pilot a time machine invented by her ex, in hopes that she could see just how bad global warming has become, so she could alert the present. Set in 2019, it already feels strangely dated in terms of how much crazy stuff has happened.
There is a remarkable amount of detail regarding not only the time machine and how it works, but minutia like the suit she wore and her log of the things she saw. While she didn't encounter Wells' Eloi or Morlocks, she did see the evolution of electronic drones that gained sentience and came armed with lasers. There's also a surprisingly affecting set of encounters Lay has in 2030 with her ex, who details a lot of the world's problems at that time. The result is just strange, as Lay maintains Wells' obsession with detail that tends to supersede character narratives, but it's all laid over how she'd imagine encountering these things in person. It's a fictional story that feels strangely personal and intimate, touching on Lay's own feelings about mortality.
Lay's art is typically crisp but much more restrained and less stylized than usual when it comes to the character work. That's because she saves the weird stuff for her character's encounter with swarms of drones and a giant octopus creature in the far future. The whole book does have a curiously flat quality to it, in part because Lay's character is somewhat passive. She's just sort of there for the ride and to record things, as she skims her way through time. It's not unpleasant to pass the time with her (so to speak), but like much of Wells' work, it's not as interesting as the premise suggests.
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