Bring Me the Head of Susan Lomond
Cartoonist: Connor B
Publisher: Silver Sprocket / $11.99
February 2025
Macabre is putting it lightly with Monroe Poole. When she says something like Bring Me the Head of Susan Lomond, she means it. She’s tried bombs, pits, lightning, creative acts of mad science, saving the prom (in order to kill the king and queen, of course), but nothing seems to be able to get that girl. Don’t call it a high school story, Connor B’s comic is a rivalry- between a football star and an evil genius too shy to speak to each other. Bold enough to attempt murder, though.
This one is for the cartoon enjoyers. The Harvey and Gold Key comics readers. Not the bean-shaped golden age face of Little Dot we think of from the cover, but the charm of the recurring characters from the back pages of Li’l Abner. Oddly sharp and weirdly bleak work done by the semi-anonymous guys who also designed mascots and did other pro illustration to make ends meet. There’s a clear Addams Family comparison, yeah, but also Charles Addams’ peers in bohemian satire like Jules Feiffer– who shares B’s un-Addamsesque messiness. When grandma frees the uncle from being deprogrammed in the basement to watch soap operas upstairs instead, that’s a Jules kind of joke. There’s a baseline of vintage violence but B’s work is definitely from today. Monroe Poole spends too much time on the internet, just like everybody else.
Poole talks like a pre-Code Hollywood villain and her date to the prom is a statue that’s come to life after a brain transplant from Monroe’s late uncle Nero. But nobody seems to notice the inexplicable occurrences, not the way they do after-school events. It isn’t the cartoonery that threatens to stop the prom, it’s property damage. Zaniness met with total nonchalance in a very Rocky and Bullwinkle way. B’s heavy contour/contour heavy drawing style rambles from precise marks to chunky basics in a way that evokes SuperMutant Magic Academy, along with the normalcy of weirdness that its setting demands. B’s world is way more mundane, allowing for realness, relatability in the way Poole and Lomond act around one another, a counterpoint to book’s the extremes that, for me, made the read. Connor B seems to find embarrassment funnier than slapstick, when best laid plans blow up in your face, and so do I.
The golden age comics grown out of long-running strips had the same sensibility as Susan Lomond, dropping plops but not stopping. They feel more cartoon than comics. A strip would end on the joke, but in the comic version, the story keeps going, the gags keep coming. Constant jokes, so many that you don’t even stop to acknowledge them, and that is cartoony, too. The throw-away gags are incredible, actually. Half the fun of the read is the that kid should play basketball jokes. Why are you alive? When Moore is being talked over, the offending speech balloon gets dispersed like it’s fumetti, with a hand waved in front of her face. Susan Lomond expects you to be paying attention the whole time, so it can fit in more jokes, so that a stand-alone story can be treated like you’re tuning in mid-season to tonight’s episode. B is quick and verbose like Looney Tunes, consistently breaking from the pursuit of plot to crack one-liners. Just, with Poole, the joke is likely to be lethal. It’s brisk and it’s packed and yet it doesn’t feel over-constructed or fabricated. Despite the paranormal it still feels normal. B gives the reader everything.
Okay so good faces are one of my favorite things in comics. And I don’t mean realistically rendered, or the over-detailed gross-out insert shot in a cartoon. It’s hard to put your finger on just what it is, but a comic can get me with its characters looking goofy or sacked or shocked. The difference in expression between being silent and being rendered speechless. Bring Me the Head of Susan Lomond is a good face comic. You don’t have to like a thing only because of its story’s value, whether it was good or not, what it had to say, where it went. Compelling moments come from everywhere-anywhere, a face in a crowd, connections that defy explanation or come mostly from within, undeniable as they are inexplicable. I like the art vibe overall, the kid core, but the read is peppered with passing transcendent reactions- throwaway jokes- mostly comic levels of exhaustion cracking the mask. Monroe Poole is going through it and the reader can feel it.
Old school newspaper Susan Lomond would be full of characters getting knocked off their feet in the last panel, or having their hats pop off; the Susan Lomond we read in 2025 cuts to a reaction shot. A silent beat that speaks volumes. It makes a potent little moment, slams the end on the joke, and makes way for the story. Timing is crucial to humor, and B gets it. Thinking about comics as images in sequence often leads to talking about film theory- like right now. Editing in film allows the creators to manipulate timing, to manufacture humor. And though Susan Lomond is static and incapable of forcing a pace on its reader, it’s still that cut to the next shot that makes the joke. The reader sees some of the story stuff coming long before the genius does (heck, the giraffe can tell), so B nailing how it lands is really what makes it funny.
B is very good at communicating how harrowed the main character becomes, all Poole’s plotting and deception make for not all that much sleeping. She unravels as the book goes on, I think it helps legitimize the earnest emotions that come flooding in at prom. The exhaustion and nervousness is recognizable, real despite the spare and cartoonish stylization of the book. Alarmingly relatable comedic weariness. A rivalry story about losing one’s grip on animosity and everything else due to sleep deprivation happens to be the concern of one of my favorite sci fi time travel novels, To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. Poole’s archaic, flowery, and nigh-endless self-narration would be right at home on a skiff in a boater floating down the river on holiday.
Also this book is for kids? I had no idea, though when you isolate the characters and the plot from the execution and tone, young protagonist, prom, emotional growth opening the locked door, yeah I can see it. There are free supplemental materials online for the classroom (we produced a few of those for the impromptu home classrooms of the 2020 lockdown). Nobody told me this book was for kids. Besides we delineate what’s for kids and what’s for adults by publisher, it’s a YA book if it’s from a YA publishing house, right? Because we have a commodified definition of art instead of letting comics define itself as an artform? Maybe. I remember when mistaking a Silver Sprocket book as being for kids was fiscally and socially dangerous. And yet, we are entering an age where books can be culturally recognized as the best adult reading on offer and also the best book for young readers. Sometimes the art comes first and the editorial categories second.
So. Susan Lomond is a beguiling creature. A throwback that couldn’t be more locked in on the zeitgeist. Flippant and casual, expecting a dedicated reader to fully engage with its earnest and absurd storytelling. Not made for me apparently but totally my thing. Contrarian me normally likes when a story I’m reading feels like a single episode pulled from deep in the season when I know that there isn’t anything else besides the one comic. But in this case I desire the Sad Girl Space Lizard treatment. Give me your sketchbook addenda. Your character development doodles. I don’t need more story but give me more moments, please. Bring Me the Head of Susan Lomond is the perfect amount for a comic: not enough.
Bring Me the Head of Susan Lomond is available from Silver Sprocket or wherever finer comics and books are sold.
