Experience Tales to Spoil Your Dinner in Mystery Meat
What goes into the food we eat is often one of the most awkward and averted social taboos around today. So how would you like a new comic series to force the topic down your throat?
It’s the premise of Mystery Meat from writer Cody Goodfellow, and you can back it here.
From the Press Release:
Author CODY GOODFELLOW and artist MIKE DUBISCH have launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish and distribute MYSTERY MEAT, a savage underground comic that explores one of the last real taboos in American life––what’s in our food.
“Horror––in comics, in prose, in film––has become so tied to its oldest, lamest conventions,” says Goodfellow, “that it’s become just another form of comfort food. Masked killers, demonic possession, fast or slow zombies––they’re hoary metaphors that distract us from the very real horrors encroaching upon everyday life, and the fateful choices we often make in blind haste, precisely because we cannot bear to face them. This comic is a loving tribute to the kind of horror comics that artfully blended surreal imagery with fearless examination of the commonplace, but it’s also a lurid and vulgar warning to those who don’t want second-hand dreams of horror, but horror that just might wake them up.”
Of Mystery Meat, horror comics legend Stephen R. Bissette (Swamp Thing, Taboo), who wrote the book’s introduction, says, “Cody and Mike go much further, and way, way, way beyond, what’s come before.”
Mystery Meat is a 66-page graphic novel that tells of the rise, fall, and metamorphosis of an experimental artificial meat product and the rundown company town forced to test it. Written by Cody Goodfellow (Radiant Dawn, All-Monster Action, Dark Horse’s Creepy) and drawn by Mike Dubisch (The People That Melt in the Rain, Weirdling, Gore Shriek, The Creeps), this misbegotten passion project expands on a short comic Goodfellow wrote, with art by Jeff Wamester (Guardians of the Galaxy cartoon), for MySpace Dark Horse Presents in 2009.
Speerburg is a company town––founded, wholly owned, and run with an iron fist by Speers Meats. Every aspect of its citizens’ lives is dominated by the relentless rhythm, the nauseous stench, the endless, industrial cruelty of the slaughterhouse. So it seems like a brand new day when the killing floor shuts down and the company switches to a bold new “artificial animal product,” known as nuMeat.
As they eagerly become guinea pigs in this grand new experiment, they soon find that nuMeat is so much more than the most delicious edible flesh ever to come out of a vat… It’s a key to unlocking lost and buried dreams, forbidden desires, and inhuman ambitions. But soon, they will discover the unspeakable secret of nuMeat and the unbearable cost. For even in the new cruelty-free, scientifically controlled, scarcity-free future… YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT.
In four gut-wrenching, heart-rending 12-page black-white-and-gray comic stories drawn by Mike Dubisch (Gore Shriek, Weirdling, Bela Lugosi’s Tales from the Grave, The Creeps), as well as illustrated prose, articles, and ads, Mystery Meat revisits the paranoid style of underground horror comics like Skull, Slow Death Eco-Funnies, Taboo, and Death Rattle to create a surreal mythos that does for American consumer culture what the landmark manga Uzumaki did for Japan.
The Mystery Meat Comix campaign runs through August 19, 2016.
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