by Kevin Gaussoin, Editor-in-Chief

Among our favorite superheroes and sci-fi legends, a lot of our favorite comics have at one time or another taken a dark and gritty turn. While we’ve seen darker versions of formerly pretty benign things like Chuck E Cheese and Winnie the Pooh in recent years, We never thought we’d see a dark and gritty version of Richard Scarry’s BusyTown turned up to eleven, but here we are: Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees. An alternate universe BusyTown where Ms Honey, the schoolteacher bear, is here Samantha Strong, brown bear and the town’s friendly hardware store owner who is a serial killer on the side.

Official Description:
Don’t. Murder. The locals. This is small-town serial killer, upstanding citizen, and adorable brown bear Samantha Strong’s cardinal rule. After all, there’s a sea of perfectly ripe potential victims in the big city just beyond the forest, and when you’ve worked as hard as Sam to build a cozy life and a thriving business in a community surrounded by friendly fellow animal folk, warm decor, and the aroma of cedar trees and freshly baked apple pie… the last thing you want is to disturb the peace. So you can imagine her indignation when one of Woodbrook’s own meets a grisly, mysterious demise-and you wouldn’t blame her for doing anything it takes to hunt down her rival before the town self-destructs and Sheriff Patterson starts (literally) barking up the wrong tree.

As the Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees official description intimates, our main character Samatha is an anthropomorphic bear living an idyllic life in an idyllic town… except the part when she can’t quite take all the small town cute animal goodness and something inside her drives her to drive to the nearest big city that, while populated with the same sorts of assorted anthropomorphic animal varieties, immediately shows that the rest of Patrick Horvath’s world doesn’t share Woodbrook’s perfection. And that’s why Samantha comes here to release her inner beast. 

As you’ll see in the video interview with creator Patrick Horvath at SDCC below, Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees‘ Samantha isn’t a murderer driven to kill only the bad guys, like a teddy bear Dexter, no, she’s addicted to murder and kills in the big city because the population density and lack of sweet small town perfection makes it a place where Samantha can get away with her dark activities. She’s gotten away with this for year, but now there’s a new killer right in her shiny Woodbrook, and she cannot brook that. 

Patrick Horvath’s watercolor picturebook art brings to life his children’s storybook environment and characters and twists them just perfectly to show what’s hidden beneath that perfection. Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees shows the incongruity in anthropomorphism: What is being sold at the town butcher shop? How are the still represented wild animals different from their clothes-wearing analogues? How far beneath the surface of seemingly ideal civilization lies savagery and murder?

Check out our interview with Patrick Horvath where we take a peek Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees at San Diego Comic-Con 2024. 

Rating:
ComicsOnline gives Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees (TPB) 4.5/5 unexpected murderers.

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