Dark Entries: Roman Dirge’s ‘Lenore’

The Cute Little Dead Girl, otherwise known as Lenore, is the pet project of artist (and Skinny Puppy fan, droool!) Roman Dirge. Though Lenore started as a comic for Xenophobe Magazine, she was also animated for 25 spooky filled episodes on Sony’s ScreenBlast. You can catch up with the episodes here (scroll down).

Having enjoyed Dirge’s deadpan, surreal characters for some time now, I was excited to have in my hot little hand a hardcover copy of Roman Dirge’s Lenore: Noogies from my BFF, Titan Books. Why you might ask? Because everything is better in hardcover and because this is an updated, full color version of the original four Lenore issues.

Dirge starts the book off with a little introduction as to why he reissued Lenore, with a very sad but amusing story that I only believe because weird things happen to weirder people:

“This redoing of the book took hundreds of hours of painstaking love to achieve. My hard drive containing the original digital files of the book fizzled out and died long ago. That was OK because my original files were still in the computers of my original publisher. That was OK too until a drunk driver ran into their offices, drove around inside trying to get away, effectively destroying any surviving digital files of my work.”

Yikes.

It’s great to see Lenore in full color and fun to reread some of my favorite stories which are well known for their surprise-twist and often bloody endings. Some favorite parts of the book include The Boy With His Heart in a Box, the footnote about Chinese people, Mr. Gosh and Things Involving Me. Noogies is a fun read, with lots of pretty pictures and enough subliminal mind control to keep you coming back for more.

You can pick up a copy of Noogies here.