Paranoid Gardens starts with conspiracy, progresses through hallucination, and drives directly into extraterrestrial elder care.
Which is to say that Perfect Gardens starts with the strange fully turned up to 11.
It shouldn’t be a surprise: each member of the creative team, from writers Gerard Way and Shaun Simon down to colorist Dave Stewart, has worked on incredibly strange comics. Way’s run on Doom Patrol might be the most stylistically and metaphysically true to Grant Morrison’s genre-changing run (to say nothing of Way’s Umbrella Academy, a phenomenon all its own), and Shaun’s work with Way on Fabulous Killjoys only slightly overshadows his equally delightful and whimsically odd Wizard Beach.
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But for all that pedigree, the most dazzling aspect of Paranoid Gardens is the artwork by the storied British artist Chris Weston, who gives the concepts a beautiful, fully-realized weirdness that lives in the middle of the Venn Diagram marked ‘Stylized Cartooning’ and ‘Absurd Photorealism’. The artwork is so incredible that the reader has to assume that if these alien oldsters actually existed, they might just look exactly like they do in these pages.
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Indeed, the entire world of Paranoid Gardens feels earnestly real. The bizarre, supernatural oddities of the book – ghostly janitors, living walls, out-of-control super-beings – are grounded by the mundane senior care trappings. Alien beings going about the quiet boredoms of retirement – nurses, meds, idiotically half-assed volunteer entertainers – create a pace of exacting normalcy. Our primary protagonist, seemingly an average nurse, is a mysterious amnesiac with a life-giving touch, and somehow that feels completely natural.
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The creative team goes to great lengths to undermine the story’s existential novelty in such a way that the book feels instantaneously subversive. A wide, all-inclusive spread of genre tropes is almost dimissively upended with such succinct ease that the reader has no problem accepting a cartoon mascot-obsessed secret society. In executing all this subversion the book follows in the footsteps of countless deconstructionist masterpieces, Doom Patrol among them.
This first issue establishes a bevy of compelling mysteries while making great, counter-intuitive leaps to make the wondrous commonplace. This comic juxtaposition cements its unique place on the comics rack: there isn’t anything that feels like this, right now, nothing so lovely and odd. It all but begs that readers commit to chasing down further issues; whether the motivation for doing so lies in uncovering the mystery or simply existing in this cozily bizarre world is irrelevant. Both are equally valid.
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