I tend to be a little sceptical about comics featuring S&M clubs and a cast of drug users and transgendered characters - especially when, so far as I'm aware, the creators do not fall into any of the foregoing categories.  It's not that there's anything wrong with these themes per se, it's just that they get wheeled out with monotonous regularity by writers looking for a cheap way of symbolising how arty they are.

Fortunately, How Loathsome is an exception.  It's a book that's genuinely interested in these people as characters.  Yes, they're unusual characters - self-consciously unusual at that - but Ted Naifeh and Tristan Crane place equal stress on how basically normal they are as well.  When all the characters are off the beaten track to various extents, one result is a rise in the background noise level of weirdness which paradoxically helps the characters to come across as people rather than categories.

This first issue focuses on lead character Catherine Gore's obsession with the transgendered Chloe.  At its root, it's a sweet love-at-first-sight affair, as Catherine is immediately smitten only to end up realising that Chloe's feelings are more superficial - and tied up with her own sense of gender identity. 

As well as Catherine's own reactions, we get a more oblique approach to the subject  in the form of a six-page minicomic supposedly by Catherine herself, in which she recasts herself as the isolated, romantically miserable protagonist of a goth fairy tale featuring such delights as consumption and bereavement.  It's interesting use of the story within a story device - it avoids the obvious route of making it desperately bad or of trying to portray the character as a genius artist.  Viewed in isolation it would be a rather middling story with an inadvisably high goth quotient, but in context it gains added layers of meaning without simply mapping itself directly to events in the main plot.

The striking, angular artwork gives the book a highly distinctive look.  While the series itself seems to hold back from fully engaging in Catherine and Chloe's desire to be seen as "other", it still delights in playing up their appearance.  A slightly softer approach is taken in the minicomic sequence, but without losing the sense of style.

Sidestepping many of the usual cliches associated with this sort of story, this is a strong start.

Rating: A

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