All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go $2.00 Swine Song Comics For more information visit the Swine Song Comics web site.

All Dressed Up is Elrod's first book, so it's not surprising that his talent and greenness are equally represented. His skills as an illustrator are quite obvious; he proves equally adept at sketching gruesome skeletons, muscle-bound men and comical monkeys. The thing that hinders the effectiveness of these illustrations is the lack of words. Over the course of the book's twenty pages (including both covers), there are probably fewer words than this review already contains. While comics are largely about the artwork, Elrod doesn't always make his story progressions clear from frame to frame -- especially with "Cuddly Cannibals in: Cuddly Cannabis", where one might have to reread the one page strip a number of times just to piece together the chain of events properly. The verbiage shortage also means a brisk read -- the book took me a little over fifteen minutes, and that was with close study and analysis. The level of detail in the drawings and thematic unification of the strips as a whole adds repeat value, though, so I wouldn't call this a bad investment, especially when fifteen minute EPs go for ten bucks in most music stores.

So what about that haunting portrayal of life that I mentioned earlier? Well, it's probably the one thing that makes All Dressed Up worthwhile. The two "Sleepwalkers" strips make the point subtly. The first, "Working Stiff", conveys a rather typical "corporate America is sucking our souls out" concept, but Elrod sells it by depicting, in stark lines and shadows, the slow decay from normal man to rotting corpse over the course of a work day. The second, "Shallow", takes a more humorous look at an empty America by depicting a dating game show where the winner is left with the severed arm of the inquiring bachelorette.

Three more verbose and haunting shorts comprise the meat of the book. "Merrily...Merrily...Merrily" conjures up that Chick tract vibe when a seemingly happy man is faced with the inevitability of Death, who assumes the classic Grim Reaper garb and takes the man on a gondola ride to his demise, reminding him of the time he wasted in escapist thought. The closing line "And, though I'm merely a figment of your dying mind, I shed a tear for you... ordinary man" hits hard, with an earnestness that diminishes any similarities to an aesthetically wanting tract.

You have to turn the book vertically to read a monologue on life's meaninglessness. The illustration of a man falling from the sky and into the hands of predators is a frightening reminder of our mortality -- the protagonist cannot even hope to win out, so instead of fighting, he asks himself the question he had been avoiding: Was it all meaningless?

The third strip would definitely make Jack Chick proud, as it consists of a man's trek through hell. The character goes through a series of rationalizations at the beginning, but finally admits that his vices earned his spot on the south side of eternity. There could possibly be a spiritual undertone to this strip -- the character ends the strip by saying that he had honestly doubted the reality of hell and that now he must pay up -- but no solution is offered, so it poses a more open-ended challenge to readers to assess life's worth.

Elrod does a commendable job of avoiding preachiness in each of these stories, and creates a truly haunting world; the scary part is that it's really our world. These are sobering issues, to be sure, but certainly ones that we all must face. That's what makes All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go a sort of universal mirror.

-- Phillip Buchan