In 1988, Epic Comics released “Someplace Strange,” a graphic novel by Anne Nocenti and John Bolton. It shares its basic structure with Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz,” and Gaiman’s “Mirrormask”: A child (in this case, three of them) enters a strange dreamworld whose denizens mirror real-world anxieties. A bunch of weird things happen, and then they awaken back in the real world.



Writing in the late 1980s, Nocenti wanted to speak about her own Cold War/ nuclear war fears, as well as general childhood/teen social insecurities. She gives us two brothers, Zebra and Spike, who alternately play with and torment each other. At night they quiz their parents about nuclear holocaust and look for monsters under the bed.





Sneaking out to defeat the monsters of their fears, they encounter their neighbor, a surly punk girl ironically named Joy, and find that her cellar door transports them to a surreal land where the ground is chocolate cake, and a cavalcade of personified fears torment them. Joy sprouts rainbow-hued wings and, like Harold with his purple crayon, can use a magic marker to create physical objects. She draws her neuroses into a character, half her and half monster, that comes to alive to menace our heroes. Message: The real threat is internal.



Spike is turned into a zombie, and the other two have to round up his missing internal organs, then defeat the big meanie with the aid of a composite super-hero drawn by Joy at the kids’ description. Then everybody wakes up in the real world and goes home.







After the main story ends, Joy’s demonic giant returns for an encore monologue about the nature of fear, concluding with the hope that human courage can give fear itself something about which to be afraid.




Spike and Zebra, based on John Bolton’s actual sons Edward and James, are plucky kids who find the gumption to fight the monsters that live in every kid’s closet. Back when I was reviewing Nocenti’s Longshot #4, I noted that she seemed to be throwing all of her story and character ideas into that series rather than giving them space of their own to explore. Sure enough, Spike and Zebra are essentially two members of the Bratpack kids whom Longshot encountered. They play Space Rangers. They fret about Mutual Assured Destruction. They encounter monsters lurking in the darkened corners and wonder if they’re dreaming.

Joy is a more confusing character. In the afterword, Nocenti says she imagined Joy to be “the nasty sneer curling up under every cheerleader’s lip.” But she doesn’t come across that way at all; she has much more in common with Judd Nelson’s outcast character John Bender from the film “The Breakfast Club” than she does with the snarky, socially cut-throat cheerleaders of “Bring It On.” Much of the time she’s talking in a threatening manner to someone who’s not there.



With Longshot and Beauty and the Beast, I remarked how Nocenti seemed to over-explain everyone’s internal states. This time, she swings the other way. We never learn why Joy is who she is, though just from her archetype we can guess at the emotional (and perhaps physical) wounds poorly concealed. One page suggests that she’s actually someone’s family dog who got left behind when they moved, or maybe I’m reading it wrong?



As with stories of this sort, the plot tends toward the surreal and nonsensical, just a skeleton on which to hang the art. This is where John Bolton earns his keep with a nonstop array of gorgeous painted images which are this work’s main attractions. The very page numbers at the bottom of the page come to life, guiding the reader onward. It’s a neat experiment, and Bolton obviously had a blast painting his own family lovingly into the story.