'Stray Toasters' is not your average comic book. It was originally published in 1988 by Epic Comics, an imprint of Marvel, as a four-issue mini-series. I somehow got hold of the first two issues around that time, a point when I was starting to get into what was being called graphic novels. I wasn't a big comics books fan as a kid, though I read the 'Eagle' weekly and, later, '2000 AD Monthly', and I never really got into superheroes. However, the late eighties was when comics were reinventing themselves, with titles like 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns', and I was interested as to what was happening and why. So I delved here and there and somehow found these and it's fair to say that I'd never seen anything like 'Stray Toasters' before.

Reading all four issues in a 2003 collected edition from Graphitti Designs, I realise that nobody had seen anything like 'Stray Toasters' before, except perhaps in what its creator, Bill Sienkiewicz, had hinted at in titles like 'Elektra: Assassin', which I read around that time too. However, while that is a challenging non-sequential impressionistic blur of a book, this is all those things on steroids. It's less of a book with characters and plot and more of an experience that we let wash over us.

It may best be described as an overwhelming assault of imagery, presented in multimedia collage. Some of it's drawn and much of it's painted, but Sienkiewicz was a classically trained artist and he knew both how to do things by the book and how to subvert the rules for effect. I'm used to that in writing; every writer should know grammar backwards because you can't effectively break rules if you don't know why they exist to begin with. He does that with art, combining all sorts of wild and experimental approaches to hallucinogenic effect. I've never seen anyone in comics use texture in the way that Sienkiewicz does. We don't just look at this art; it trips our other senses too.

The story is dark, as was the norm for anything deemed mature in comics in the late eighties. It's apparently set in a near future dystopia, but we get very little idea of the city we're in. However, dogs are apparently extinct and cats are everywhere. Also, the mortality rate in girls has risen to eighty percent, meaning that, if people are having kids, they're generally having boys. Why any of this is important, I have no idea. None of it seems to have any relevance to the plot. I think it's just another form of texture to go with all the other textures Sienkiewicz trawls in.

The plot is outrageously unclear because nobody in the story seems to be a reliable narrator, not least the nominal lead, Egon Rustemagik. He's a criminal psychologist whose speciality is figuring out how awful people tick, which the cops see as no different from being one of them. After Sgt. Al Wenzel calls to wake him for a case, my immediate impression was Will Graham, the FBI profiler in 'Manhunter'. Like Graham, Rustemagik spent time in a mental facility because his work places him in seriously dark places, though we later realise that that was on false charges. He is and was, however, an alcoholic, and that lends his investigation plenty of incoherence.

There are other characters but not many of them. The murder victim is Deborah Dissler, the first human face we see, though that isn't until the seventh page in. She's in therapy and she's scared, which seems fair given that she returns home to be murdered by some industrial kaiju behemoth with a toaster for a head. I don't believe he's named within the comics themselves, but the cover of the first issue suggests he's Big Daddy. I initially took him to be a physical manifestation of all the awfulness in her boyfriend, but that wasn't my first mistake.

Deborah's therapist is Abigail Nolan, who seems to be a psychiatrist when treating her but more of a dominatrix prostitute when treating the assistant district attorney, Howard Chalky. I doubt she's both so I took this to mean that we always see her as her patients see her, following on from how I saw Big Daddy. Chalky is clearly an insane sexual pervert, so maybe he sees every woman as a dominatrix prostitute. Crucially, Abigail Nolan is also Abby, Egon's ex, the one who got him put away for a couple of years in Bosley. His current girlfriend is Dahlia, who looks as black and white as if she came out of the silent era. Indeed, she reminds of Gloria Swanson in 'Sunset Blvd.'

There's also Dr. Montana Violet who seems to appear out of nowhere. He's apparently a doctor, but he's grotesquely obese and blue in colour, because he's suffering from cyanosis from head to toe, which makes me wonder how he's still alive and why anyone would choose to see him. He also has a TV show, which in this book does not suggest anything positive. In keeping with many other comic books and graphic novels of the time, television is seen with universal disdain.

And then there's Todd, who's the MacGuffin of the book, and I still haven't quite figured out, as he seems to belong to everybody at some point. He's even identified as a cat at one point, but that's deliberately misleading. He's a young boy, very possibly autistic, and he can be read a whole slew of different ways, each of which changes the flavour of the entire book. He's the key to all of it and so his elusiveness is the elusiveness of the entire book in microcosm.

Initially, I thought he was Deborah's boy, but we later learn she's unmarried and has no kids. Then I thought she was Abby's, perhaps with Egon, and that he's dead, likely providing the reason for a constant fear of the past Egon suffers with. He's clearly traumatised and treating that trauma in bottle form. He often struggles to recall what he did, without any context or explanation. Maybe Todd, whoever's he is, grew up and become Big Daddy, the toaster motif tying to his fondness for jam and toast. He doesn't speak a lot of words but he does speak those.

The best explanation I've found online is by Greg Matthews at EBSCO, and he states that Todd is Dahlia's. While she believes him dead, he's really still alive and in the custody of Dr. Violet, who's enhanced him through technology to become Big Daddy. I'm not going to say that he's wrong. His summary seems entirely plausible and he has a much clearer take on this than I do. However, I'm not convinced that 'Stray Toasters' is that clear about anything.

Oh, and there's one other character, but he's not really a character at all, just someone who adds an ironic layer of comparison to the story. He's Phil and he's either Satan himself or a demon who works for him. The very first page features him leaving his family in Hell for a holiday up here on Earth. He occasionally gets a moment where he's doing something touristy, like standing in front of a piece of art in a museum, but mostly we read what he's doing in postcards he sends home. By the end, the suggestion is that it's worse up here than it is down there, again, not atypical for the mature comic books of the late eighties.

I like 'Stray Toasters' a lot, because it's what film folk would call an auteur vision. Sienkiewicz was making his name as an artist at this point, with successful runs on 'Moon Knight', 'Fantastic Four' and 'The New Mutants', none of which I've read. However, just from 'Elektra: Assassin' and those two issues of 'Stray Toasters' I acquired, his style has remained clear in my memory for what must be almost forty years now. Few artists are that distinctive. However, here he chose to write too. This is his story, his art and his presentation. It's all him and it's an unflinchingly original vision. If it makes sense to you, great, but, even if it doesn't, it carries a huge punch. I relish originality and it doesn't come more original than this. ~~ Hal C F Astell