Lewis Trondheim makes me feel like the laziest person on the planet, or on any planet: he’s been working for 16 or 17 years and made about a billion jillion comics, and they’re all good, and he keeps working with more people and trying new things. A.L.I.E.E.E.N. (original title A.L.I.E.E.N.; in French, two E’s are as funny as three) is like the result of some unwise bet by the devil: “Sure you’re versatile, you can do minimalist wordless slapstick strips, and you can do funny animals for grownups, and you can do fantasy parody comics full of sick humor for kids, but I bet you can’t do all three at once!” So this is a minimalist wordless slapstick funny animal fantasy gronwup comic for kids, and it’s like almost nothing else, and it is hilarious and sick, sick, sick, sick.

Allegedly it’s a kids’ comic from another planet, found discarded on Earth (so some of the pages look artfully weather-beaten), written in an unknown language, about a few dozen different kinds of brightly colored critters having a variety of serious problems. Some of the problems are pretty basic: one character accidentally pokes his eyes out on page two (Wertham was right!); another wants to give people presents, but they’re not appreciated; another has to figure out what to do with a pet/friend/colleague who literally can’t stop crapping, ever. Others are more complicated: why do cheerful Pokemon-looking people like to club little blue shrimpy people on the head?; why does the mad scientist(?) want to dissect a floating weeping ghost(?) that looks like the creature he just smooshed and fed to his plants(?)?; did the little birdie guy just die, or was that his clone that grew out of a clonifying eel type thing? Since you can’t read the words, part of the fun is trying to figure out what the rules are, and in some cases you realize that you just can’t. It doesn’t really matter, because the characters are so expressive - it’s like Trondheim is playing an instrument whose notes are Happy, Hopeful, Hungry, Perplexed, Greedy, Bored, Scared, etc.

The one thing it kind of resembles is Jim Woodring’s great Frank, which has a similar setting (mostly pastoral), things that turn into other things without warning, and no words. But where Frank is more haunting and esoteric—a chronicle of currents inside Woodring’s head—A.L.I.E.E.E.N. reads like a plain fun narrative that just happens to include some incomprehensible and/or highly disturbing events. The overall message seems to be: the laws of nature are harsh, and all physical beings commit outrages or endure grossness, and these things are funny.