I picked up a print copy of ‘Til Death Do Us Part at NYCC but I didn’t realize it was a webcomic until I saw it mentioned on the blog Progressive Ruin. It’s a 12-page teaser for the Court TV show of the same name, and the comic won’t be winning any Eisner awards, but it’s worth a quick peek if only because the narrator is the filmmaker John Waters. You can see him looming evilly over the newlyweds on the front cover; inside, he plays sort of a Rod Serling role, introducing the story at the beginning and appearing at the end to tease the show.

The story is a good example of why I don’t watch Court TV: It’s about an undertaker who is jealous of his saleswoman wife, with good reason. Although it starts cute, with him doing her makeup on the slab before she goes to work, the standard cliches are quickly trotted out: the possessive husband, the handsome and predatory boss, the wife who loses weight and starts an affair. Then John Waters reappears to announce that one of these people will murder the other, and you have to do some silly thing—watch a video and vote.

The art in the comic is not bad, but unfortunately you can’t see much of it online, thanks to the crappy interface. What you see on the website is a fairly small two-page spread of the comic; move your pointer over the text bubbles and—SPROINGGG!—they enlarge to legible size, leaving the pictures muddy and small. The interface is easy to use, and it’s kind of cool to watch the page turn and the word balloons pop on top of the art, but the web designer doesn’t seem to understand that pictures are an important part of sequential art.

Still, John Waters as the Grim Reaper… At least someone at Court TV has a sense of humor.