Laughing at the absurd, the ugly, and the awful

When I first booted up Anthology of the Killer, I wondered whether the art style of this episodic game released over five years would meaningfully change over the course of my playthrough. In many ways it does–each level or short story within the collection has its unique aesthetic, textures derived from the project’s sampling and original art communicating mixed media. The observation that prompted that original query was simpler, that the protagonist's character design (which is generally consistent, with some plot-specific changes) instantly put me in mind of Home Movies, a Cartoon Network Adult Swim show from the early 2000s. There are brief but explicit references to The Simpsons – not an Adult Swim show, yet still a mainstream antecedent to the adult cartoon programming block; and over time it put me in mind of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Squidbillies, Superjail!, even The Venture Bros. More coherent than some shows from the late-night block, more ominous in conclusion if not more serious overall, and exhibiting an aesthetic that is alternatingly charming and abrasive, Anthology of the Killer feels like series creator Stephen “thecatamites” Gillmurphy is working in the milieu if not in direct conversation. Anthology of the Killer is like an Adult Swim game for a more overtly bleak era, using cartoon violence, the surreal, and the absurd to satirize life after the End of History. It is especially expressive of human agony, anxiety, and the reflexive sarcasm of living in a world where so many of the rules seem like bullshit. This all works thematically because of the semi-parodic horror-comedy nature of the story.

Anthology of the Killer takes place primarily in an unnamed (“XX”) city in an unnamed country. The walking sim follows BB, a zine publisher who lives with sister ZZ in an apartment building with steel shutters for a security system; this is a mad world with an abundance of serial killers and death cults. BB responds to the mundane and depressing alongside the macabre and supernatural with amusement, confusion, panic, and occasional outrage. BB goes with the flow, sometimes leaning into ignorance over terror. This is the consequence of living in a world where murder’s cultural dominance is far less obscured than in our own. This sort of social commentary refracts the human experience in the Global North, reminding us of the psychic damage inflicted by the structures we labor under and within, and the violence we are able to obscure through its displacement or export. XX City has a perpetual proliferation of death cults; this is key to the plot. At one point, ZZ seems on the verge of pursuing some esoteric knowledge and BB shouts “Why can’t anyone in this city go ten minutes without starting a cult?” Obsession with murder is a driving force for music and film in the world of The Anthology of the Killer in ways that overtake even the real-world obsession with true crime (a genre of which BB is an aficionado) and sensationalized violence in action and horror films.

In the first part of the anthology, “Voice of the Killer,” BB begins at an insurance company call center with coworkers covered in sheets, bizarre police presence, sequestered back rooms… She is a young person that needs to make money to support her passion, working a nebulously valuable low-satisfaction job (comedically accented by the impersonal and threatening cold-call script to sell life insurance) amid cultural and technological crossroads highlighting the impermanence. “The Killer” – a dark humanoid figure with a vulture head – casts a portentous shadow, burning the office building down while BB sleeps; other explicitly-themed murderers appear throughout, but they all seem subordinate in style, substance, and ambiguous hierarchy to our titular villain.

The fourth part of the anthology, “Eyes of the Killer” is one of my favorites – forebodingly, it begins with BB answering a call to “volunteer” at the city’s immersive theater, a responsibility she knew she would one day have. Annoyed at her character’s plot-necessitated death, BB decides to explore the other rooms to get to the base of the play’s story. As you walk her through a cast party happening contemporaneously with the show, BB sees one actor through drawn curtains contacting The Killer. Unsurprisingly, this leads to dire consequences (though the immersive nature of the play and the eventual conclusion leave ambiguous whether this was itself part of the play). BB even learns of connections between the academic death cult from the earlier “Hands of the Killer” and the play’s director, and the ending riffs on artists’ poor financial compensation ($20 for weeks of acting). It’s not the most sophisticated joke in the series, but grounds the uncanny experience of the esoteric ritual in the familiar observation, so cheeky as to almost break the fourth wall, that creative work isn’t well compensated. The work curls in on itself, almost deflating, but grabbing a nearly self-referential zaniness that marks it as part of an artistic movement of adult cartoons.

Increased technical sophistication is visible between each piece, but this episode-to-episode evolution begins to happen most clearly in “Eyes of the Killer,” with the climactic set-piece using the width of the frame and the timing of lights in a more dramatically effective way than anything prior. In “Blood of the Killer,” BB discovers another compromised moral crusader (a factory heir writing deranged letters signed “-Concerned Citizen”) while investigating a breakdown in zine distribution in a nearby riverside country town. She then chases after burning buildings and gets caught in a network of killers hunting each other. One saves BB when she thinks he’s going to kill her, saying “Don’t worry. I’m a murderer.”

In the finale, “Face of the Killer,” BB and the audience are given reason to question her recollection. The unreliability matches with the shifting geography and arbitrary rules of the world. This assertive randomness present throughout Anthology of the Killer exemplifies the attitude of much of the just-off-mainstream adult cartoons we have become familiar with over the last two and a half decades.

One quality AOTK shares with Adult Swim shows is the tendency to zig-zag through a given episode’s story by throwing randomness and absurdity into the plot. This mechanism for confusion heightens the stakes of a given story and the contradictions in the catharsis of  returning to a broken status quo. It is also an anthology that prefers ambiguity and open-endedness to their close, exploitative cousin cliffhangers. The randomness, almost scatter-brainedness, reminds me of shows like Metalocalypse. The invocations of demons, the presence of cultists seeking the end of the world, remind me of Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil. It is in the casual grossness of some of the spaces, like Ed, Edd, and Eddy cranked past 11, the fleshy goo and dank rooms, that most remind me of the intentionally abrasive art which some shows in the Adult Swim style use as the backdrop for mature themes. The definition of “mature” varies around things like “seriousness” or “sexuality” in this context, while taking on themes like government corruption, consumerism, or trauma.

Anthology of the Killer is not hyper-fixated on a sophisticated didactic political-economic argument. However, it is expressive in its distaste for capitalism and its cultural consequences – most expressly the production of junk and the transience of culture – as well as satirizing utopian movements through the deployment of cults. The simple explore-and-escape mechanics mean cults focused on death, even marketing snuff films or selling transcendence, can blend comfortably into the tapestry.

The environments have an absurd-surreal bend that complicates how the characters experience their world. Who is considered human is complicated by the seemingly irreconcilable ways anthropomorphic beings are presented; people in the same space look like they’ve come from different worlds. The game tantalizes with flesh-crafters, would-be Frankensteins, and pyramid schemers, sometimes obfuscating what should and shouldn’t stick out as unreal. Like its aesthetic predecessors on Cartoon Network, Anthology of the Killer evokes cognitive dissonance to create the space for interpretation. It can even, at times, feel profound, such as in “Eyes,” where a profane esoteric ritual with dark poetic chanting leads to the climax. The gameplay and slighter graphical changes across the episodes help sell the world and immerse the player into BB’s experience, giving the story depth of feel. 

Children’s cartoons in the 1990s often had an edge to them that gradually, at least overtly, was sanded off. Ren and Stimpy is one of the most oft-cited examples of this pattern across Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network of goofy satirical shows that pulled on the cartoon physics and violence of predecessors like Looney Tunes while leaning into grotesquerie and even sexuality. In the early 2000s, the medium diverged, with shows explicitly targeted toward adults leaning further into abrasive aesthetics, adult humor, and adult observations as, through the 2010s, this largely (though not entirely) left these children’s shows. The former is the line Anthology of the Killer draws from.

While generally the game is less detailed in its depiction than some of those shows by way of its art style, it connects to the Adult Swim school of animation through dedication to explicit violence as a tool for humor and a prism for, as well as subject of, analysis. BB is a struggling young person driven to express herself through the independently-distributed written word, but who keeps her delusions of grandeur to a minimum. BB finds herself harassed by serial killers she somehow evades, some of whom even seem charmed by her. She finds haunted corridors in nearly every building she enters, constantly confronted by the supernatural and the inhumane, about which she is sometimes curious and at other times she finds to be a nuisance. Just like many of us in the real world, BB acknowledges the insanity, adapts, and carries on.