Why ‘Sea Dogs’ is worth buying five comics a month (and why you may not know about it)
The DC Comics strip Sea Dogs is a backup feature appearing in every comic published by DC’s horror imprint, Hill House Comics. Written by the imprint’s curator, Joe Hill, and illustrated by Dan McDaid with colorist John Kalisz, Sea Dogs features three werewolves during the American Revolution, recruited by the Patriots to sneak aboard and destroy a British warship. The creative team crafts an entertaining story in just a few pages of every issue, with a narrative currently serialized across five comics a month. Backup features are a rarity for modern comics, and the unconventional narrative structure of Sea Dogs perhaps impacts the strip’s appraisal by readers and critics.
Sea Dogs is set in the year 1780, shortly after the effective destruction of the Continental Navy by British forces. Patriot spymaster Benjamin Tallmadge sends werewolves to infiltrate the feared British warship HMS Havoc, which is under the command of Captain Merlin Wolstencroft. Tallmadge believes that the horrific slaughter of the esteemed British crew by his supernatural agents will hurt enemy morale and help the Patriot’s turn the tide of war.
Backup features in comics were once common. For example, in the 1950s and 60s, characters like DC’s Martian Manhunter and Elongated Man had adventures in the back pages of Detective Comics, which showcased Batman, while the Tales of Asgard backup strip in the comic Journey Into Mystery explored the mythic world of the Marvel Comics superhero Thor.
The Sea Dogs creative team is aware of this history; the creators seem to celebrate the backup feature concept while testing its modern narrative capabilities. An advertisement on the inside back cover of the Hill House Comics 2019 Sampler (a free October 2019 publication promoting the then-upcoming Hill House titles) proclaims “EVERY ISSUE OF HILL HOUSE COMICS WILL FEATURE AN OLD SCHOOL, SERIALIZED PULP-STRIP SET ON THE HIGH SEAS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR!”
Sea Dogs is meant to be an “old school” backup strip, but its publication structure differs from past backup features. Instead of running exclusively in one title, Sea Dogs runs in consecutive installments across five comics titles. The strip’s creators have the unique challenge of telling a story serialized in short, two-page chapters across the five titles published each month under the Hill House Comics banner — Basketful of Heads, The Dollhouse Family, Plunge, Daphne Byrne, and The Low, Low Woods.
To follow the Sea Dogs story, readers need to purchase five comics a month in order to read the two-page chapters in those comics. Each Hill House title has its own creative team and a distinct narrative apparently unconnected to the features in other titles, including Sea Dogs. Other than the prominent “Easter egg” appearance of a “Sea Dogs” movie title on a cinema marquee in The Low, Low Woods #1, Sea Dogs seems to have no narrative connection to the main feature it follows in each issue.
Despite the limitations of this format, Sea Dogs is an intriguing comic featuring interesting characters and a suspenseful story. Readers are challenged to guess which of the Havoc’s crew are the werewolves, as the identities of the three saboteurs are kept ambiguous. In the strip’s opening chapters, readers never see the human faces of Tallmadge’s agents; the art team renders the trio’s human forms in shadow or at a distance, careful not to disclose their identities, although readers get a sense of their body types.
There are several characters who have similar body types and are new crew members, making them viable suspects: “Dr. Barker” and his assistant “Jean Sanguine” are clearly impostors, but are they the werewolves?; the muscular Vortigen Little, the diminutive Moses Childe, and the Native American Konkapot are press-ganged into involuntary service, but is that their infiltration plan?; and dashing Lt. Carver, child officer Midshipman Price, and Price’s bulky tutor Elezar Faulk are all new to the ship.
The werewolves’ primary target is also an interesting character. Described by Tallmadge as a former astronomy professor whose extraordinary maritime service is celebrated by the British and feared by the Patriots, Captain Wolstencroft is indeed an Oxford scholar, observant and erudite, but also respectful and attentive to his crew, willing to joke with them and consider their opinions. Wolstencroft is a sympathetic figure, not the villain readers might expect from Tallmadge’s description.
When the werewolves take action over the course of several nights, the art team of McDaid and Kalisz seem to relish depicting blood and gore on the Havoc’s deck as the saboteurs eviscerate various crew members by decapitating them and gouging their eyes, or strangling some with the intestines of their murdered shipmates.
In addition to the strip’s gore and suspense, Sea Dogs has a fair share of humor. Chapter Seven merely provides paper cutouts of the characters, inviting readers to make their own stickers; these cutouts are an ironic allusion to the bonus features found in past kid-friendly comics, but they also provide a well-placed recap of the story’s characters before the horrific action commences. Also fun is the choice to have Tallmadge summarize past story developments for readers at the beginning of a new chapter, an homage to the iconic creepy character hosts of past horror comics, like EC Comics’ Crypt-Keeper, or DC’s Cain and Abel in The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets, respectively.
There is a lot to enjoy about Sea Dogs, although it is challenging to find reviews or commentary regarding the strip. There are many reviews of Hill House Comics titles on multiple comics-focused sites, but there is a dearth of coverage and reviews concerning Sea Dogs; the feature is often unmentioned in reviews. For example, the author’s random survey of fifteen reviews, published among thirteen sites, of various Hill House Comics titles found that not a single review discussed Sea Dogs.
In comparison, the recent DC mini-series Inferior Five also has a backup feature, a five-page strip featuring the superhero Peacemaker. But unlike Sea Dogs, the Peacemaker strip is serialized in one comics series, has a higher page count, and ties into the main feature’s narrative. A random survey of six reviews, published among six sites, of various Inferior Five issues found that all but one discussed the Peacemaker backup feature.
Contacted for comment regarding why Sea Dogs was not mentioned in his review of Plunge #1 at the site Rogues Portal, reviewer Michael Thao shared that the strip’s disconnection from the main narrative, its brevity, and his unfamiliarity with the serialized story influenced his decision not to discuss the feature in his review:
“Tonally, the swashbuckling Sea Dogs felt wildly different from the creeping dread built up in Plunge. In addition, Plunge was the first Hill House comic book I’ve read so I didn’t understand what was happening in Sea Dogs. Couple this with the fact that it was only a few pages of story, I didn’t really feel qualified nor did I feel like I had anything interesting to say about Sea Dogs.”
This feedback highlights the challenges of reviewing Sea Dogs in its current format, and suggests that the unprecedented multi-title, two-page serialization of Sea Dogs may be affecting the strip’s assessment by readers and critics. The strip might benefit from an eventual collection of the entire narrative into one volume, but it is unclear when or whether a complete collection of Sea Dogs will be published. Although hardcover collections of various Hill House titles are currently available for pre-order on Amazon, these collections do not reference Sea Dogs, and no separate Sea Dogs collection appears to be available.
Hill and his artistic collaborators deliver a fun, intriguing comic within the creative restrictions of an “old-school, serialized pulp-strip” format and challenge their readers to follow the story across five monthly comic books. Given the level of craft that the creative team brings to each installment and the strip’s unconventional serialization, Sea Dogs is a bold comics feature that deserves more media attention and commentary.
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