Comics owe a weighty debt to the Swiss. Genevan Rodolphe Töpffer invented the medium in 1833 with a series of "picture-stories" composed of sequential images separated by panels with a running written narrative. But what if Töpffer had left out that last bit? Text is about as vital to comics as sound is to film, an especially useful comparison when dealing with the work of contemporary Swiss comic artist Thomas Ott. Printed in black and white, Ott's Cinema Panopticum immediately recalls early silent horror films. The characters' expressions are grossly exaggerated; and, aside from chapter headings and incidental signs, the book is entirely wordless.

The eponymous Cinema Panopticum is a penny arcade in a forlorn carnival. One day, a little girl parts the curtain and wanders in to watch its five macabre, short films in succession — alone. These Twilight Zone-esque tales form the book's five chapters, each of which teems with grotesquely giant bugs, hideous illnesses, and surprise endings that would make Rod Serling proud. Even amidst these hair-raising details, it's Ott's technique that is the real showstopper: the painstakingly created, wonderfully creepy drawings are rendered in that most eccentric of mediums, scratchboard. The overwhelming blackness of his pages, tempered only by finely scratched, white lines, recalls the early-20th-century woodcuts of Lynd Ward and Franz Masereel.

Ott's work, published by L'Association, had been kicking around Europe for a while when Fantagraphics realized the ease of "translating" wordless comics and began putting out his collections on this side of the Atlantic. Like its EC horror comic forebears, Cinema Panopticum is not all doom and gloom, and an undercurrent of humor, albeit black and absurdist, runs through the book. It is this playfulness that makes Cinema Panopticum a truly delicious read. Underneath all the ghoulish thrills, Ott's love for his work is palpable. Like the crypt keeper, he invites us to share it with him.

-Andy Warner