She feels some responsibility for the situation and tries to help him out at the park. A witch by the name of Gretchen (who's an intern at the park) was there and magicked him out of the robbery, sending him off into the street. He was in the street because he tried to hold up a diner. And he's given a life-time contract, which in his vampire-werewolf state means eternity. Eventually, he's given the bottom-rung job-selling cotton candy. They have a funny argument over the situation with plenty of off-panel bites. The werewolf HR guy thinks there's too many vampires at the park already, so he bites him to switch him to a werewolf. The vampire driver bites him to bring him back to the living, then they bring him back to the park as a new employee. As they argue on the way, they accidentally hit a guy crossing the road. Some co-workers find him hitchhiking and bring him back.

The authentic mummy (3000 years and still around!) has quit because he gets no respect from the patrons. What if a horror-themed amusement park was actually staffed by werewolves, zombies, vampires, witches, and all sorts of creatures of the night? That's Zombillenium, a theme park that's not doing too well. De Pins, also an acclaimed animator, has a clean, flowing art style-flat blocks of color eschewing black lines-that keeps his opposing scales vivid and seamless, beautifully capturing character movement, and the cluttered space inhabited by humanity. A tapestry of human behavior unfolds on the beach, mixing larger environmental battles and the sordid actions of individuals. But De Pins’s lens is wider than the world of crabs, and the hero’s interactions with two nature documentarians on their quest to film the square crab reveals the chaos of the human world and its ability to crisscross in any manner it pleases. One day, he stumbles on a way to change his direction and sets into motion a sudden evolutionary leap. A single square crab, soon to ne named Sunny, begins a journey that changes his life and the lives of all square crabs. The fictional square crabs-who are as sentient and charming as the creatures in Pixar movies-can only move in one direction, a limitation that dictates an anonymous love life, almost perpetual loneliness, and an inability to flee from danger.

Shifting from the vantage point of tiny, wandering crabs up to the depiction of larger seaside confrontations and other interactions between humans, this first book of a trilogy tells a tale of varying scales, both physical and emotional.

Gretchen arthur de pins