Whatever else you think of his frequently bizarre output, nobody could accuse Sam Kieth of phoning it in.  His stories are just too weird for that.  Haphazard and baffling at times, perhaps, but never in an obvious way.  Even when his stories don't work, it's because an experiment has misfired, rather than because of a lack of effort.

My Inner Bimbo is Kieth's latest project, a five-issue black and white miniseries from Oni Press.  It's actually one of a planned series of stories that began with Ojo, which I haven't read.  Nonetheless, despite the loose ties to concepts from other titles (including his early-nineties cult hit The Maxx), it seems to be basically self-contained.  Just very, very odd.

With a title like My Inner Bimbo, you know it's going to be odd.  Particularly when the lead character turns out to be Lo, a sixty year old man.  Lo married a woman seventeen years older than him, and lives a listless and rather unfulfilling life.  Pleasingly, Kieth writes a marriage that's winding down without resorting to the usual obvious fighting, and taking the subtler route.

Thanks to a magical trout (the recurring theme in all these miniseries), Lo has built a magic box and created Bambi, a stereotypical bimbo who might or might not be a figment of his imagination.  At this stage it's slightly unclear whether she's some sort of magical creature or whether he's had a psychotic break, although either way it seems clear that she's some sort of projection of Lo's personality.

The basic point seems to be that Lo has spent his life in the shadow of much older, dominant women and has used that as an excuse to avoid developing sides of his personality.  Bambi seems to embody attitudes to sex and woman that he's been dutifully repressing for years (Lo talks himself out of his own sexual fantasies on the grounds that they seem worryingly sexist).  It's basically a character study seen through a cracked lens, with Bambi serving as the comic relief that stops the series becoming too miserable - as she points out.

It's always hard to predict whether something as odd as this will work.  Lo is certainly a convincing character, and Bambi's surrealism averts excessive bleakness.  But Bambi is a wildly inconsistent characterisation, whose narration veers back and forth between cartoon Californianisms and more articulate commentary.  This may be intentional - after all, she's not a real character but a bundle of unresolved attitudes - but it still makes it tough to get a handle on her.

Incidentally, there are an irritating number of typos in this book.  There are stray words and errors such as "your" for "you're", "it's" for "it", "feminity", "redeption", "forge" for "forget"...  Individually, these are trivial errors, but they mount up to spoil the quality of the package.  A shame, since it's otherwise impeccable.

Nonetheless, it's an intriguing book, albeit an utterly insane one.  I might hunt down a copy of Ojo now.

By the way, if you think My Inner Bimbo is a bizarre title, one of the later miniseries is called Confessions of a Dyslexic Sex Slave.

Rating: A-

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