[A series on the Madman Library Editions by guest reviewer Zach King. Zach writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

“Where did I come from? Is there life after death? Is there a heaven? Well, I guess there is. Here we are.” — Calvin Lennox

And now, as Monty Python once said, for something completely different. With the Madman Library Edition Vol. 5, we have a book that is doubly other; half of the book is not created by Michael Allred, and that half that is features Madman almost not at all. Indeed, aside from six pages of Dark Horse Extra, Michael Allred’s Madman as such is entirely absent from the book.

The result is a completionist’s delight, early work from Allred collected alongside the continuing adventures of he Atomics under the pen of other collaborators. As a reading experience, after volumes of mostly straight-line storytelling, it can feel a bit like literary whiplash, but readers can just as easily take the ribbon marker from the spine and place it just before the first issue of It Girl and the Atomics. (Plus, you shouldn’t read 500 pages of comics all in one sitting! At least, I shouldn’t.)

The fifth volume opens with two of Allred’s earliest tales, Dead Air and The Everyman. Dead Air is an original graphic novel, Allred’s first published comic (back when he was publishing under the name M. Dalton Allred), but the sketchiness of the line art belies a surprisingly mature worldview that Allred has developed throughout his work.

Dead Air stars Calvin Lennox, a radio DJ whose small town may be the last city in the world after an apparent nuclear holocaust. Though the mayor and armed guards are blocking the roads out of town, Calvin is desperate to learn whether his family have survived beyond the borders of Roseburg. As one of Calvin’s friends puts it, “Rod Serling would have loved this,” and indeed Dead Air reads like an unaired episode of The Twilight Zone. (Music to my ears.) The resolution to the mystery is too bananas to spoil here, but we see the seeds of Allred’s curiosity about the meaning of life — issues we’ve seen Madman ponder throughout his reanimated existence.

The Everyman, too, feels like a proto-Madman. Where Frank Einstein found himself resurrected by a cabal of mad scientists, Emily Play comes back to life in a graveyard after being murdered for being a witch. And here Emily’s troubles begin, when her head is jostled onto another (male) corpse’s shoulders. Almost unrecognizable, Emily goes in search of her revenge but finds the world generally unsettled by her existence. Allred has always been a little vague about how much of the book is his and how much is collaborator Bernie Mireault’s, yet after four volumes of Madman, we can see Allred’s signature themes at play: off-kilter reincarnation, curiosity about one’s place in the cosmos, and the lonesome path one takes after becoming a freak.

In the second half of the book, Allred cedes the floor to Jamie S. Rich, Mike Norton, and Chynna Clugston Flores for It Girl and the Atomics, and I was very surprised to enjoy this run as much as I did. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I expected any non-Allred work to be a pale imitation of the master, but Rich & company do a commendable job of crafting ongoing adventures for It Girl and her mutated pals. Indeed, I found myself enjoying this run much more than I did the Atomics comics proper in Madman Library Edition Vol. 3. The story begins with a fairly compelling mystery about It Girl’s newest nemesis, Lala Wah-Wah, though It Girl is just as likely to be found playing the grim-n-gritty video game “Dark Streets.” The two plot threads intersect in an intriguing way, and the mystery surrounding Lala is classically Allred-ian in its intricate cosmology.

The art is never quite as gonzo as Madman fans may have come to expect, but Norton especially keeps pace with the sideways reality of Allred’s world. In what might otherwise have been a cheesecake “girls go out to sea” issue, Norton indulges the swirling waters for an aquatic tale that doubles as a romance comic for Dorrie “Slug” Lopez and her beau, the Black Crystal. Elsewhere, we check in with Madman himself, finding Frank still on tour with Red Rocket 7 out in deep space before It Girl runs afoul of another Triple Eye scheme and meets the Kirby-esque KImmanDoes (or Kid Kommandos, if the typography isn’t immediately apparent).

It’s all a bit breezy and fun, but It Girl still manages to touch some of what made The Atomics unsettling — that sense of mutation and difference, of trying to convert that pain into something productive. Early on, It Girl signs up with Dr. Flem to serve as guinea pig for his scientific experiments in Frank Einstein’s absence. As we can attest, though, Dr. Flem isn’t the easiest person to know, and near the end of the book, Joe Lombard (who, you’ll recall from the last volume, briefly shared a body and consciousness with It Girl) reassures our heroine, “It’s a never-ending cycle that you either make peace with eventually … or you let it keep eating you.”

It’s a bit of an odd message, but Joe’s zen-like attitude makes a small bit of sense if you live in a world where your zombie boyfriend is off in another galaxy, playing rock-and-roll with identical clones while your former somatic roommate fends off his old spy-ring and her own loneliness. It makes more sense still if you’ve read five volumes of madcap free-wheeling comics that toss you like a boat and carry you away. The alternative, Joe implies, is becoming Dr. Flem, an unknowing and unfeeling constant, driven only by his hungry curiosity (the same trait, recall, that turned Dr. Boiffard into a giant floating brain).

Yet even Dr. Flem can find a way to surprise us. Sensing It Girl’s dissatisfaction (and perhaps our own) at how some of the stories have wrapped up, Dr. Flem reveals that he’s been working behind the scenes to tie everything into a bow, such that the book can end on a triumphant shot of everyone raising a glass and toasting, “To a job well done!”

And we could raise our glasses at the end of Madman Library Edition Vol. 5, too, were it not for one last volume of the Madmaniverse. We’ll look ahead at Allred’s most recent creator-owned work, glance back to his earliest, and search around for a pair of 3-D glasses. We’re going to need them.