(courtesy Tiny Onion / Dark Horse Comics)
This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2026.
Who are the real monsters?
It’s question often asked in storylines where the obvious monsters turn out to be the good guys, or at least not the most reprehensibly evil of characters, and the supposed just members of society who embody goodness and virtue and justice fall on the wrong side of morality by a fairly wide margin.
In a world which we have largely accepted is divided into a binarily neat black and white, good and bad, it can be quite the revelation, a seditious idea that posits that the world in which we live is not as easily divided or understood as many might like to think.
But as The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos, based on an idea by James Tynion IV, and with a script by Tate Brombal and artwork by Isaac Goodhart, makes graphically clear, this neat little idea about who sits on which side of an entirely arbitrary divide is nowhere as clearcut as society wants us to believe.
As someone who grew up on the wrong side of the divide while very much inhabiting the other, just like the eponymous protagonist who agonisingly tries to be “normal” when he knows in his heart, and when it is obvious to everyone around him including his well-meaning adoptive mother, that he is not, it’s an impossible way to live, trying to fit your entirely non-mainstream self into the orthodox square pre-picked out for you that you are supposed to cram yourself into without any objection is EXHAUSTING.
As a gay man I was constantly telling myself to be “normal”, to like women and to be the good Christian boy I was supposed to be; I even went to therapy to see a Christian counsellor to help me work my way through to heterosexual wholeness.
But in the end, like the gloriously well-named Christopher Chaos, whose name refers to a messy life instigated primarily by society’s need to fit him into a box he cannot easily or quietly fit inside, hence the chaos, I had to admit to my actually well-meaning therapist that I was a gay man and that I wanted to be my authentic self rather than some artificial construct that would make people around me more comfortable but leave me feeling miserable.
It’s a journey that we see Christopher go on, and while it’s impossible to say too much more about the world he soon inhabits, where opportunity and danger equally abound, but not importantly, a delicious sense of freedom that allows him to be wholly himself, without spoilers cascading everywhere, anyone who has ever felt like an Other or out on the tortured margins, will find a great deal with which to identify in this brilliantly told coming-of-age tale.
(courtesy Tiny Onion / Dark Horse Comics)
What does strike you about The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos is how astoundingly well the creators have taken a fairly well-worn trope and fashioned it into something breathtakingly and compellingly original.
The idea of someone feeling like a monster when they are simply not a recognisable part of the mainstream is hardly a new one, but the graphic novel’s creators have taken that oft-told idea and give it renewed emotional intensity and some fiercely vivacious imaginative fire and sheen.
That narrative verve is burnished considerably by gorgeously alive and colourful artwork which brings out both the dark and the light of the story, and they exist in equal measure throughout, in ways that effectively cause the story to leap off the page.
There is a luminously arresting 3D-quality to the imagery which grants the 2D world-building of the graphic novel an almost flesh-and-blood quality, a sense of being plunged into a story which roils and moves and casts itself about with gritty, tortured abandon.
But The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos is also a thoughtfully meditative piece of visual storytelling which goes big and action-packed in much of its epic storytelling where the “monsters” face off against fundamentalist religious types who are arguably far more evil than those they seek to obliterate, but which is also able to sit quietly and with much nuanced emotional force in its more intimate moments.
Those quieter moments of life changing introspection make sense when you’re dealing with highschoolers having to grow up fast as they come across long sought after answers about who they are and who they wish to be, and their inclusion adds so much richness to The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos as does of course the queerness coursing through many of the pages.
As allegories go about the mainstream vs. the margin, of good vs. evil and the monsters vs. the normal people go, The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos is an outstanding example of its kind, beautifully executing on extravagantly imaginative world-building, rich, original characterisation and a mythos which draws on what has come before it but which is very much its own rare and wonderful creation, much like many of the characters who populate its exquisitely well-wrought pages.
(courtesy Tiny Onion / Dark Horse Comics)