Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children (a review)

You ever come across a comic book that’s so strange, so out-there that you become instantly fascinated by it? You’re not even sure why it strikes such a chord in you but you know that you have to hunt down the rest of the series no matter how long it takes or how much money you have to put down.

And as you collect the rest of the books, your interest in that weird little series grows even when some issues aren’t that great. Yeah, it might’ve been bad but it was still interesting. Then, when you’ve finally collected and read the entire series, you look at the stack of books and wish you could erase your memory just so you could rediscover those weird adventures all over again?

Yeah, that’s the s*** right there!

Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children is a series that was published between 1989 to 1992 under the DC sub-imprint Piranha Press (how many of these sub-imprints did they have!). The whole series was written by Dave Louapre, American Freak and Vertigo Visions: Dr. Occult, and illustrated by Dan Sweetman, The Last One. So, we’ve even got some Vertigo alumni for this one. Neat.

The whole series is 30 issues long but there is also one anthology and a trade paperback reprinting two issues. I haven’t been able to get my hands on this extra content because the anthology alone is going for…