Review: ‘Bowling With Corpses And Other Strange Tails From Lands Unknown’ Is Joy Among The Moody Folklore

Welcome to the table,

Bowling With Corpses and Other Strange Tails from Lands Unknown is the kind of creative work that brings me a joy that is hard to put into words. I’m going to try, but I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that this comic is fantastic and I love absolutely everything about it from cover to cover. Let’s get into it.

In short, this book is packed with new folklore stories written and drawn by Mike Mignola. If you walked up to me on the street, at a convention, hell if you popped out from under my bed in the middle of the night and said “Hey, do you want more folklore from Mike Mignola?” I would forget everything else odd about the situation and ask you what next steps needed to be to get said lore.

I am the audience for this book. 

What Mignola is able to do in these pages is what he has been doing for the majority of his carrier in comics: crafting compelling and unique stories that feel both fresh and new and, at the same time, so timeless that they could sit along side the stories of the lion with a thorn in his paw or the tales of the three billy goats gruff.

The stories all flow from one to the next in a beautiful way and focus on a collection of protagonists ranging from Spoon, the boy who bowls with corpses, to a woman making deals with the Queen of Cats, to ghosts with gold in their guts and wolves that walk as men. Each story breathes not only with the atmospheric artwork that is uniquely Mignola, but with this spirit that just feels like you have selected a book from the shelf of some long forgotten library and flipped through the pages to find new fables from a far forgotten kingdom.

When I was younger I did not get a lot of time in gym or outdoor activities with other kids. I’m sure the school or the school’s lawyers wanted to be sure I was not going to get hurt, and as a kid who could barely move around without the use of his crutches, it made the most sense to send me away when the other kids were playing kick ball or whatever they were doing with that big rainbow tent thing.

This lead me to spend a lot of time in the library where I got to know the librarians and I got to spend a good deal of time in the quiet corners of the shelves that no one really seemed to touch. I read the books about the teachers who were aliens or the kid who hatched a dragon in middle school, but for the most part I really loved sword & sorcery and the books filled with folklore and fables.

There was this feeling I got as a kid when I found a new book of folklore that I have been chasing since childhood. It was this combination of wonder and excitement as each story felt like it connected me to a hidden history written by a scribe who had seen a far more mystical world than what I saw in my day to day life. Bowling With Corpses and Other Strange Tails from Lands Unknown fills reconnects me to that wonder.

There is so much to unpack in this book, so much to discover. It’s brilliantly written, beautifully illustrated, and, honestly, this is the kind of thing I could see living on comic shop shelves, library shelves, and anywhere else that stories can be found.

Until next time, this book is fantastic in every conceivable way and is one of those books that will for sure stand the test of time.