Odder All The Time

I figured I'd talk about today's selections together, since it's the same character by the same author. So there's Dean Koontz' Odd Thomas, and then the comic he did with Queenie Chan, In Odd We Trust. Since the comic is set earlier, I'll start with it.

Odd Thomas lives in the town of Pico Mundo, in California. He's a fry cook, who tries to help the ghosts he sees as best he can. He sees the ghost of a young boy who has killed during a home intrusion, and sets about trying to find and stop said killer before they strike again. His girlfriend, Stormy, is eager to lend aid (she doesn't share Odd's hang-ups about guns), and he's on good terms with the chief of police, who is also aware of Odd's abilities and trusts his advice.

The plot is a thin. There's really only one suspect, though there was a brief time where it seemed Koontz and Chan are trying to convince me Stormy's friend, Sherry, actually killed the boy she was sitting, but that's quickly dispensed with. Odd and Stormy come face-to-face with the killer, but without evidence, can't do anything to him. Odd gets faked out by the killer, which seems to happen to Odd a lot. Odd may help the police, but he doesn't have any formal training in detection, so he can be lead by the nose if you knows he's on your trail. The killer gets his comeuppance, but in such a way none of the protagonists end up with blood on their hands.

It's a little strange to see pictures of characters I only know from books, because the pictures don't usually match up with the image in my head. I'm finding now that the comic's version are starting to overwrite the versions I had, but maybe that's because I'm thinking about the comic. I may have to read one of the other books in the series and see what I visualize.

I didn't initially like Queenie Chan's version of Odd, probably because it clashed with my vision, but it grew on me. Odd is an upbeat guy who tends to get along with others if given a chance. He didn't ask for this ability, but he uses it the best he can, and he considers it a gift. A fellow like that should have an open, cheerful face. Her Stormy's eyes are somehow different from everyone else's. Her irises seem to have lighter rings within the darker color, while most of the other characters tend to have solid colors. it draws my eye to it, and gives the impression there's more going on there than you might think at first glance, which is what you might expect of Odd. But he's pretty much who he appears, while Stormy keeps more hidden.

A couple of stylistic bits I liked. During the action scenes, Chan tends to have panels that are the width of the page at the bottom, and they're taller at one side than the other, with the effect alternating from one side of the page to the other. It works quite well for guiding the eye from one panel to the next, though sometimes I reached the bottom of the page, and I was on the wrong side, so it wasn't leading my eye to the next page. Still a nice effect within a given page. Also, during tense conversations, she tends to go for more panels, not necessarily to accommodate the increased dialogue, more to narrow the focus. More close-ups of faces, or hands, or relevant clues. I think it's meant to represent the character's narrowing their focus to only what's directly in front of them in a difficult moment.

Two touches I didn't understand. At times, characters will be standing, and there's an area of white space around them. A little further away and the background is visible, but immediately around them, nothing. Maybe it's meant to make them the focus of my attention? The other thing was that sometimes a character will be speaking, and the entire panel background is white, except for a bit of checkerboard pattern, either at the top of the panel, or the bottom. It usually only covers a 1/3 of the background and then stops. It may be trying to guide the eye, but I'm not sure.

One scene that completely lost me. Odd is reading several creepy letters Sherry received prior to the death of the boy. Odd looks over them, with the panels cutting between views of his face and parts of the letters. When he's finished, Odd says he thinks the killer will strike again by August 26, or 4 days. How he came to that conclusion, I have no idea. It seems out of line with how his powers are normally presented to make that sort of deduction. One of the letters mentions a book about a child killer who killed 6 girls, but claimed he killed 27, so maybe Odd replaced the 7 with the 6?

OK, let's hop to Odd Thomas for a bit, which is a straight up novel. Odd wakes up one morning, and almost immediately has to help a young girl ghost by catching her killer. Which he does. He heads to work, and while there an unusual man enters. Unusual because he orders a lot of food for just himself, but also because he's very interesting to the bodachs. The bodachs are wraithlike creatures that show up when there's about to be death. The name was provided by a young boy Odd met who could also see the dead, who died five minutes later. Even though the bodachs have no physical presence, Odd would prefer they not realize he can see them, just in case.

He alerts the Chief, who puts a tail on the man (who Odd dubs Fungus Man), while Odd sets out to do some investigating of his own. He finds some disturbing things inside the man's house, including a room light can't penetrate, that also can move one through time. The room later becomes an ordinary study. No explanation for its earlier strangeness is conclusively determined. Odd and Stormy soon find themselves being followed by the man, but manage to elude him, while Chief Porter takes precautions to guard against a slaughter against a bowling alley (Odd's been having nightmares about such a thing for a while).

Things start to go awry, as Odd finds the man he feared was a killer dead. In Odd's shower no less. Which leaves Odd scrambling to not only avoid getting a murder pinned on him, but also find who is really planning the slaughter. He knows it hasn't been averted because the bodachs are growing in number all the time. So he has to get it in gear and save the day as best he can.

The book spends a bit more time describing Odd's life, and those of his friends. So we get to know them and what makes them tick, and other than Chief Porter, they all have problems. Lost loved ones, estrangement from family, or abuse in their pasts. Odd's parents in particular, are a pair of losers. The father's a hedonist trying to hide from work and the fact he's aging, and Odd's mother is fine as long as you request nothing of her. If you so much as ask her to help you talk through something, she flips. Which makes it all the more interesting Odd uses his powers to help people. Someone must have helped him develop a sense of responsibility to others, but I'm not sure who. I'm not certain Koontz should have devoted two chapters right near the climax to introducing us to Odd's parents, though. The whole time he's trying to get them to help him through this block he has, he's cognizant of how close the time everything's going to go to hell probably is, but he keeps on this path. If I didn't know he was the hero, and so would have to arrive in time to do something, I'd have worried he was going to miss everything.

Consistent with the comic is that odd, for whatever powers he does have, is no genius. His powers can only do so much, and he's involved in a supernatural world he doesn't understand at all. That means whatever rules or advantages he may think he has, may not actually exist. So it makes a certain amount of sense how he gets outflanked by his opponents. He's making things up as he goes along, they've put considerable planning into their work, and they know more about their plans than he does, obviously.

While I found it kind of interesting to read one of these stories in comic form, I think the book was better. It had more time for character development, even if I don't think that development was well-placed all the time.