Here, though, the political overtones are so blatant they all-but overwhelm the supernatural business. The tale is driven by a band of machine gun-wielding monsters with skull faces and overcoats that lord over the cowed citizens of a bleak, murky community. The protagonist is a harried man named Perramus who narrowly escapes a raid by the creatures, only to end up aboard a ship manned by his oppressors.

     Perramus is put to work disposing of the corpses of executed people until, together with a comrade known as Negrtio, he escapes with the cadaver of a high-ranking dissident. Perramus and Negrito use the corpse to blackmail some high-ranking officials, which leads to a dangerous attempt at freeing a political prisoner.

     As scripted by Juan Sasturain, the above is muddled and often downright incoherent. The best thing about the project is the nightmarish artwork of Alberto Breccia, rendered in magnificently skewed, expressionistic black and white; in Breccia’s visual universe the skies are always stormy and the scenery bathed in various shades of darkness. Breccia’s work lends the proceedings an aura of chilly oppressiveness that the story fails to achieve.

     To be fair, the afterward by Robert Boyd, which fills us in on Breccia’s five decade career in Argentine comics, makes the claim that PERRAMUS contains allusions that can only be fully understood by residents of Argentina. I believe that’s also true of the comic as a whole.