By David Hitchcock (Titan Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78276-129-7
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: an Xmas scary story in the Grand Tradition… 9/10
Britain can lay claim to impressive and ingenious achievements far too numerous to mention, but the ones I’m honing in on here are our prodigious appetite for inventing myths, our gift for telling scary stories and our plucky tendency to want things done right and thus often Doing-It-Yourself…
In 2005 cartoonist, antiquarian and fright fan David Hitchcock (Spirit of the Highwayman, Whitechapel Freak, Gothic) crafted an intense and beguiling small press yarn in three chapters which went on to win the Eagle Award for Favourite Black & White Comic Book.
Originally released under the Full Circle banner, Springheeled Jack was subsequently released as a collection from Black Boar Press and is now available in a luxurious oversized (295 x 222mm) definitive monochrome hardback from Titan Comics.
The astounding suspense is handily preceded by the author’s introduction, recapitulating the historical reports of the original Urban Legend from the first sightings and police reports in 1838 in ‘At the Heels of the Devil’ before the dark graphic enchantment opens in 1861 with an arcane monstrosity roaming the foul, begrimed rooftops of London to the accompaniment of excerpts from the journal of Sir Jack Rackham.
Although still not without influence, the esteemed Sole Benefactor of Bethlehem Lunatic Asylum has been a broken man since his beloved Evelina was snatched from his helpless arms one foggy night by a monstrous insectoid fiend from Hell…
The thing’s depredations still continue but the authorities scoff at the administrator’s suppositions and ignore his protestations, leading the nigh-deranged Rackham and the few allies he has made to take matters into their own hands.
Although the red-eyed thing primarily snatches women, its malevolent, toxic influence, unbeknownst to all, has seeped into the highest echelons of the empire and the monarchy itself is currently in the greatest peril imaginable…
One person Rackham believes he can count upon is Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose own incredible metamorphic discoveries also stem from encounters with the beast – or, as they speculate, perhaps some being from beyond the stars – but when the physician visits his old comrade he is appalled to se how far Sir Jack has fallen into despair and madness.
Jekyll can do nothing for his friend, however, as he has been summoned as a matter of utmost urgency to the side of the mysteriously ailing Prince Consort…
In an attempt to keep pace with the monstrous leaping travesty of nature, Rackham has constructed a bat-winged suit which allows him the glide after the beast when he eventually finds it, and now he waits for his opportunity.
In Windsor, upon examining Prince Albert, Jekyll sees something which shakes him to his soul and the doctor consequently dashes back to Rackham to join in his pursuit.
The thing has been going about its secret purposes incessantly, and its influence now even extends deep inside Rackham’s troubled Bedlam Hospital where confined savant Professor Graham claims to have discerned all there is to know about the threat…
That night Jekyll and Sir Jack rendezvous in a graveyard and lay a trap for the horror. The plan apparently works and they follow it to its lair, discovering the shattering secret of its depredations. They set to derailing its plans, but in the struggle a hero is infected and a shocking mutation begins to take hold…
The saga then kicks into ghastly high gear as a game of cat-and-mouse finds the police unjustly hunting the wrong “manâ€, as all over the capital nature itself rebels from the hideous and almost completed incursion…
The tension rises to fever pitch in ‘The Last Chapter’ which sees a final desperate roll of the dice and a good man is seemingly lost forever before ‘Transmogrify’ finds humanity itself on the verge of its greatest triumph or defeat…
Also included in this titanic tome is a copious 22 page ‘Sketchbook’ section which comprises roughs, layouts, previous covers, physical models and constructions, plus an exploration of Hitchcock’s unique art style which involves preliminary pencils, full inks and a final layer of moody, mediating pencil tones on top of it all to capture the grimy sooty atmosphere of Victorian London.
Stark, gripping and chillingly compelling, Springheeled Jack is a grand, old-fashioned fearsome fantasy no lover of dark tales can afford to miss.
Springheeled Jack © 2014 David Hitchcock & Black Boar Press.