BEAUTIFUL STORIES FOR UGLY CHILDREN
How a cult comic series was my gateway drug to literature
What was the most random thing you bought on eBay during the lockdown? Come on, we all bought something weird, didn’t we? Me? I purchased a near complete lot of the comic book series Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children for twenty bucks. Long out of print and never collected in trade paperback, single issues are still the only way to revisit this creation of writer Dave Louapre and artist Dan Sweetman.
That the fate of Beautiful Stories is an open-ended mystery is apt. After all, one day in 1989 it just showed up in comic book stores looking like no other title beside it. Each issue was a self-contained short story accompanied by Sweetman’s uneasy and jittery illustrations. The stories were morbid and realist reimaginings of myths and archetypes through an American sense of irony, with Louapre’s writing voice jumping from Jim Thompson to Joe Frank as needed.
