#BookReview ‘Lenore’ by Roman Dirge

Roman Dirge’s cute little dead girl, Lenore, faces off against the legendary Time Goats in the G.O.A.T. fight of the century!

Join Lenore, Pooty, Ragamuffin and Taxidermy for an adventure 100 million and six years in the making!

SHE’S BACK AND THE WORLD’S A MADDER PLACE FOR IT!

It’s been seven years since Roman Dirge unleashed his last LENORE BOOK on an unsuspecting world and now he and she are back in an adventure almost too epic to synopsis!

Genius is a word bandied about a lot, but Roman Dirge stands alone as one of the funniest and most unique talents in the comic book firmament, producing a truly one-of-a-kind brand of comic book.

The adventures sees Lenore the undead Victorian girl with a fondness for cats and a demented sense of humour and a caustic wit reunited

 with her trusty set of bizarre friends that includes a stuffed doll called Ragamuffin who houses the soul of a vampire, Pooty, a bucket-headed demon with a pitchfork and Taxidermy an immortal beetle-headed Ancient Egyptian god with antlers who protects children.

Reunited after being separated and lost across the entirety of all-history, after eating three Time Goats who’d come to save them from a demented demonic pickle hat, Lenore and co must make one last stand and do battle with a futuristic army of enraged Time Goats from the far-flung future who’ve come to Earth for revenge!

From the primordial ooze of the dinosaurs to the opulent splendor of Ancient Egypt and Rome, to the far flung future of the Time Goats, this 112 page masterpiece is a hilarious and relentless madcap romp across time and space with a gag rate second to none!

ARGHHH!

This book is so stinking cute and hilarious and just all round brilliant, I can’t stand it!

Laughs have been in short supply around these here parts-I imagine, most parts- in 2025, so I am so glad to find that my laughing muscle still works and that I can find things hilarious and dark again (thanks Roman!)

Titan Comics kindly gifted me this review copy of the ‘The Time War’, which was published in July 2025 and collects all the editions of the latest Lenore comic.

Lenore, in case you didn’t know, is the famous little dead girl who has adventures with her friends, Pooty, Taxidermy, Ragamuffin and Recap Squirrel, are split up, thrown through time, and must try to work out how to reunite in order to bring down their latest enemy, time travelling goats. Which they also accidentally created…

Straddling the beginning of time and stretchign way beyond that, into the future, our plucky band of heroes need to get back to their own timeline in order to set time straight , as it were, if time can be considered a linear progression from the prehistoric period onward…

Lenore and Pooty are trapped inside her mansion for 4 years at the start of the book-thanks Recap Squirrel!-and are so hungry they start cooking the taxidermied things around the house just to survive, whilst the homicidal Pickle Hat which is keeping them captive keeps them there. A Time GOAT appears as the Pickle Hat not dying (as it was resurrected by Lenore) has set off a catacyslmic set of events which has the goats going back and forth in time to undo what Lenore did.

Still with me?

Good!

Except, instead of getting Lenore and Pooty to help them, they are eaten by our hungry heroes and transported across time and space to the

places they were last thinking of.

Ragamuffin ends up in dinosaur times, Pooty in the Roman era and Lenore in a Lovecraftian space, and all three spend the rest of the book trying to undo the mess they got in, whilst maing even more messes for Recap Squirrel to explain.

I am so invested in Recap Squirrel, he has a whole backstory we need to know,could Recap Squirrel have his own recap squirrel?

The art is lush and so well rendered, you can see just what is going on ion every wobbly frame (this is basic yes, but many comics I have read lately have their storyboards so murky that it is hard to work out what is going on)

The action is as thick and furious as the jokes, you find out what was the game invented before Marco polo was invented, Ragamuffin names the dinosaurs after serial killers and Lenore seriously pisses off an Elder God with her lack of respect.

Their fast and furious adventures are hilariously rendered, there is so much to enjoy whether there is a single or multi frame page, and it has Titan’s customary quality production in terms of the colouring , the thickness of the paper and endpapers too.

Highly recommended, you don’t have to have read any of the series as this is a perfect diving in point.

Pickup The Time War and enjoy!

Roman Dirge (born on April 29, 1972) is an artist and magician, and the creator of the Lenore comic-book series; he currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

Told by his art teachers that he would never make it as an artist due to his crude style, he quit art and became a full-time magician.

After a few years, his passion for art overtook him and he created the comic about Lenore, the Cute Little Dead Girl for Xenophobe magazine. The comic strips were later seen by Dan Vado, president of Slave Labor