Marlene

(Slave Labor, 2006)
™ and © 2005 Peter Snejbjerg

You might have seen Peter Snejbjerg’s underappreciated art poking around various DC titles, but this Slave Labor Graphics release translates his original Danish work written by the artist himself. It’s creepy and funny and sexy and scary, and leads off with one scary monster that would have Freud scribbling furiously in his notepad.

Detective Michael Joergendsen is investigating the murder of a Peeping Tom, but finds the bodies piling up around the object of the victims’ erotic obsession, one Marlene Mortensen. A one-night stand between the two leads to bitter complications, especially when Joergendsen begins to suspect Marlene is a witch. But if her innocent act is as believable as it seems, who’s doing the supernatural killing? A fine tale, that snaps off the page.

— Brendan McGinley

From the Comics Buyer’s Guide:

Originally published in Denmark in 1998 under the title Mareridt, Marlene is your basic, garden-variety comic book about Satanism, sex, body doubles, and boobs. The titular character is a nude model who poses for a sweaty, grubby, overweight painter and sculptor with a strange proclivity for peppering Shakespearean dialect with much cursing and grunting. When a peeping-tom stalker with a fondness for Marlene turns up dead, a detective named Michael investigates the case, forms a relationship with Marlene, and gets much more than he bargained for.

Marlene would best be described as a murder-mystery horror yarn riddled with sexual depravity. And, in that sense, it works very well. The characters, while not particularly likable (or entirely knowable), are strangely compelling, the plot has fairly well executed twists and turns, and the art is sophisticated in its use of shadowing, character modeling, and composition. Snejbjerg uses softer scenes (such as Marlene working on her bicycle) in nice contrast to the more horrifying imagery.

Visually and verbally explicit, Marlene is for adults only.

— Brett Weiss

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Notes

Writer

Artist

#1

January, 2006
Cover Price: $3.95
1 copy available for $2.98

Peter Snejbjerg