Category: Horror Stories

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ring of Fire


By Doug Petrie & Ryan Sook (Dark Horse/Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-200-5

A hunger to be frightened is printed on our genes and courses through our surging blood. Psycho-killers, ravening monsters, unsuspected epidemics, funfair rides, overdue bills and a host of other things – daft and not – all trigger our visceral, panicky fright, fight or flight response and thus always feature highly in our mass entertainments.

These days however the slow-building tension and cerebral suspense of the printed genre has been largely overtaken and superseded by the shock-values and sudden kinetic surprise action of both small and big screens with the entire oeuvre also doused in a hot sauce of teen alienation, unrequited love and uncontrollable hormones – all making for a heady (if often uncomplicated and flavourless) brew.

That transition was very much the result of a landmark American TV show and assorted media spin-offs which refocused the zeitgeist. However Dark Horse Comics’ clever, witty graphic interpretation of the cult global mega-hit TV franchise Buffy the Vampire Slayer is what interests me most, so here’s another look at the still-active illustrated narrative iteration to revel in and reel over.

Once the company secured the strip licensing rights, they began producing an engaging regular series, a welter of impressive original Graphic Novels, numerous miniseries, spin-offs and specials. Moreover, long after the beloved TV show finally died, from 2007 onward comics delivered creator Joss Whedon’s un-produced continuity-canonical Season Eight and beyond to the faithful fans and followers.

In case you’re young or just terminally clueless: Buffy Summers was a run of the fashion mill bimbo-ised Californian Valley Girl and hip teen cheerleader until she suddenly metamorphosed overnight into a monster-killer: latest inheritor of a mystic, unpredictable genetic lottery which transformed mortal maids into human killing machines historically known as Slayers.

After moving to the small Californian hamlet of Sunnydale – secretly situated on the edge of a mystic portal The Hellmouth – she and a close band of friends battled devils and demons and every sort of horror inexorably drawn to the area and all of whom, what and which considered humanity a snack and our world an eldritch “fixer-upper” opportunity…

Scripted by prominent screenwriter and producer Doug Petrie (in his time a writer, director and co-executive producer on the Buffy show) and sublimely illustrated by Ryan Sook, Ring of Fire was released in 2000 as a slim, full-colour, all-original graphic novel which firmly established the artist as a major comics talent.

I’m concentrating here on the Titan Books British edition and – if you’re asking – the tale is set during TV Season 2 (which ran from Autumn 1997 to Spring 1998) when Buffy’s mysterious vampire boyfriend Angel had reverted to a soulless slaughterer of innocents.

His latest victim was High School computer teacher Jenny Calendar, who moonlighted as a gypsy witch and practising technopagan. She was also the one true love of Buffy’s mentor Rupert Giles, a Watcher of the venerable cult tasked with training and assisting Slayers in their anti-arcane endeavours.…

The suspense unfolds one dark and stormy night twelve miles off the coast in ‘The Rising’ as a Japanese cargo ship transporting ancient Samurai armour weathers staggering waves and a visit from a ghastly vampiric horror calling himself “Angelus”…

The 500-year-old war suit once belonged to warrior demon Kelgor, who tied his power to it and raised an army of undead killers in 16th century Japan.

Now all Angelus and his less-than-willing allies Spike and Drusilla need to bring on the necromantic End of the World designated “The Ring of Fire” is the corpse of Kelgor himself (hidden by Watchers half a millennium ago) – and they’re expecting the Slayer to find that for them…

Cool vampire villain and über-predator Spike eventually became a love-interest and even a moodily tarnished white knight, but at the time of this collection he was still a blood-hungry, immortal immoral jaded psychopath – every girl’s dream date – even though he was severely wounded and confined to a wheelchair. His eternal paramour was Drusilla: a scarily demented precognitive vampire who originally made him an immortal bloodsucker. She thrived on new decadent thrills and revelled in baroque and outré bloodletting…

With Giles all but paralysed by grief, “Scooby-Gang” stalwarts, Willow, Xander and Oz are left to search the reference files for information. As their painstaking study bears dark fruit Giles is ambushed by Angel and Dru at Jenny’s grave. Buffy is there to rescue him, but that just gives Spike the opportunity to follow the merely human vampire hunters and activate the Samurai’s blazing revival spell…

Rushing to their side Buffy manages to (mostly) destroy the freshly resurrected Kelgor, but as she pursues the Slayer is arrested by Federal spooks who know exactly who and what she is…

Frustrated but not thwarted the vicious vampire trio are at each others throats until Dru realises that there is still a little life in Kelgor’s remains. Moreover, the demon is offering to share his centuries old back-up plan with them.

Hidden with the scattered remains of ‘The Seven Samurai’ graves throughout the state is the secret of true resurrection, and if they gather the contents of those hidden toms, all their wicked wishes can still come true…

Meanwhile, locked in a covert police detention centre Buffy faces exposure to the world and worst yet, her mother…

Giles is gone: fallen far off the deep end and reverted to his old, manic persona of “Ripper”, but that’s not a bad thing since he knows the people who arrested Buffy aren’t government agents… or even people.

However before he can get to her, back-up Slayer Kendra busts her imprisoned predecessor out.

(When Buffy once briefly died the next Slayer was activated, and even though the Blonde Bombshell was subsequently revived, Kendra, once here, wasn’t going away…)

The manic action ramps into high gear as the Japanese hell-lord is finally fully reconstituted and forms an alliance with Dru, leaving Angel and Spike twisting in the wind even as the “Feds” are exposed as opportunistic demons trying to secure the resurrection spell for themselves in ‘Kelgor Unbound’.

They are ultimately frustrated in that diabolical dream as Ripper has taken off with it, crazily hellbent on bringing back his Jenny…

…And across town Buffy, Kendra and the gang are too late to stop the final ritual. Dru and Kelgor exultantly awaken a colossal flame-breathing devil bird to expedite their conquest of humanity and, forced into a tempestuous alliance with Angel and Spike, the vastly overmatched Buffy and Co need more magic than Willow can conjure.

They need Giles back or the world is lost…

Visually engaging, sharply scripted and proceeding at a breakneck rollercoaster pace, this smart and furious action-fest perfectly captures the brittle, intoxicating spirit of the TV series and remains an easily accessible romp even if you’re not familiar with the vast backstory: a creepy chronicle and torrid thriller as easily enjoyed by the most callow neophyte as by any dedicated devotee, and this compulsive chronicle also includes a quirky introduction by author Petrie and a fascinating sketchbook/commentary section by editor Scott Allie, liberally illustrated with production art and preliminary designs from Ryan Sook.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer ™ & © 2000 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

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Mesmo Delivery


By Rafael Grampá with Marcus Penna, translated by Júlio Mairena (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-59582-465-3

In an industry and art form that has become so very dependent on vast interlocking storylines, an encyclopaedic knowledge of a million other yarns and the tacit consent to sign up for another million episodes before reaching any kind of narrative payoff, the occasional short, sharp, intensely stand-alone tale is as welcome and vital as a cold beer in the noon-day desert.

Just such a salutary singleton was Mesmo Delivery, first solo English-language release of singularly gifted writer/artist Rafael Grampá who originally devised the macabre and gritty thriller in his native Brazil in 2008.

Picked up and translated by Dark Horse two years later, this stark and spookily effective grindhouse/trucker movie amalgam offers dark chills, gritty black humour and eerie, compulsive mystery in equal, intoxicating amounts. And it all starts, unfolds and ends here. No muss, no fuss, no busload of tie-ins.

Aging, raddled Elvis impersonator Sangrecco is a very odd deliveryman working for a rather unique haulage business. For a start he can’t drive, which is why hulking, gentle cash-starved ex-boxer Rufo has been temporarily hired by the boss to operate the truck on a run through very bleak bad country.

Rufo doesn’t ask questions. He just drives the big container rig with its mysterious, unspecified cargo that he’s not allowed to see to God knows where, listening to the obnoxious, pompous Sangrecco mouth off about his many, unappreciated talents.

Things take a bad turn when they break at the isolated Standart Truck Stop. The Elvis freak is too lazy to even fetch his own beer, and when Rufo takes care of business and grudgingly tries to pay, a sleazy pack of locals trick him into an impromptu street fight on a cash-bet.

The ploy is a set-up and when Rufo proves unexpectedly tough the prize-fight gets too serious and results in a fatality – possibly two…

Street-fighting head tough Forceps then convinces his “townie” cronies and the other onlookers that they need to get rid of all the witnesses.

…Which is when old Sangrecco reveals what his speciality is…

Stark, brutal, rollercoaster-paced and rendered with savage, exhilarating bravura, this thundering, down-and-dirty fable grips like a vice and hits like a juggernaut, providing the kind of excitement every jaded thriller fan dreams of.

Also included in this slim, scary and mesmerising tome is an effusive Introduction from Brian Azzarello, pin-ups by Mike Allred, Eduardo Risso, Craig Thompson and Fábio Moon and a stunning 16-page sketch, design and commentary section ‘Making of Mesmo Delivery’.

Since Mesmo Delivery, Grampá has gone on to shine with his deliciously eccentric Furry Water as well as on such established titles as Hellblazer, American Vampire, Strange Tales and Uncanny X-Force amongst others, but this superbly visceral, raw storm of sheer visual dexterity and narrative guile is an ideal example of pared back, stripped down, pure comics creativity that no mature lover of the medium can afford to miss.

Mesmo Delivery ™ and © 2008, 2010 Rafael Grampá. All rights reserved.

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Dead Air


By M. Dalton Allred with Laura Allred (Slave Labor Books)
No ISBN, ASIN: B000GLP8JG

Major comicbook creative force M. Dalton (‘we call him “Mike”’) Allred’s many comicbook writer/artist triumphs include Madman, The Atomics, and Red Rocket 7 as well as notable collaborative runs on Marvel’s X-Force and X-Statix with Peter Milligan and Vertigo thriller iZombie with Chris Roberson, but unlike almost everyone else in the industry to reach an exalted status, most of his early work was – and remains – extremely readable…

After switching from a career in the media to funnybooks, he commenced his unique brand of tale-telling (aided as always by wife Laura) with a dreamily paranoid, visually symphonic suspense shocker very much in the mould of classic 1960s Rod Serling Twilight Zone mystery tales.

Originally designed as a black and white 4-issue miniseries, Dead Air was instead released by independent publisher Slave Labor as a complete Original Graphic Novel and reintroduced comics to the thrills of uncanny, inexplicable paranoiac peril through the channelled artistic sensibilities of modern design legend Patrick Nagel (upon whose remorselessly pared-down stylisations Allred based his own early drawing).

Following The End of the World, the poignant personal horror begins in ‘Shapes of Things’ as, in the small American town of Roseburg, Oregon, radio DJ Calvin Lennox stares at the blue glow coming from over the mountains and wonders…

One night all communication with the outside world was completely lost. All the TV channels blinked out to static and there was nothing but dead air on the radio. Soon Mayor Leroy Black had declared Martial Law and instigated a curfew: nobody out and nobody in, and order viciously imposed by the sheriff’s bully-boys.

Everybody knew it had to have been the long-deaded nuclear war, but Lennox didn’t care. His wife Sydney and their two boys Michael and Connor were miles away in Eugene when the disaster – whatever it actually was – had struck, and Calvin was going crazy trying to get to them.

Asking Black to let him leave only resulted in a savage beating, so Lennox carefully laid plans with lifelong pals Charlie Custen, Warren Goodrich and Kevin Zelch to escape from the captive population, all the while barely holding off the bubbling madness, desperation of loss and agony of not knowing…

Their moment came in ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’ as the determined quartet made their break with the unexpected assistance of an unsuspected ally. The attempt led to a desperate car-chase and an exchange of gunfire which permanently scarred the frantic family man and badly wounded Warren, but soon they were all on their way, riding on an open empty highway that was somehow, subtly… wrong.

Warren was the one who spotted it.

Everything looked fine, with no sign of atomic – or any other physical – destruction, but the road no longer had any turn-offs or exits…

Freaked out, the fugitives continued on and began to notice that the scenery, landscape and mountains now seemed altered and oddly different. It was like they’d been transported to another world….

With reality reeling, they stop to assess their situation and, after some discussion, decide to push on and find Sydney and the kids. Switching to the motorbikes, they travel on – far, far further than the normal distance to Eugene.

The horror starts to hit home in ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ when the interminable highway is interrupted by a beach and sea-shore miles from where it should be. Nonplussed, Calvin breaks into an empty lighthouse and sees his destination just over a ridge. Somehow Eugene was just there, but there was something not right about the city’s edges and outskirts…

Baffled and combative, the freaked out friends move on to find a familiar city filled with forgotten childhood treasures but utterly devoid of life. As they separate to explore, Calvin discovers he can now see through John’s eyes just as a glowing blue cloud begins to dissolve all the buildings…

Only Warren and Calvin escape the all-enveloping mist and the heartsick, bereft family man is filled with a terrifying partial understanding as he turns their vehicle back towards Roseburg for the incredible answers to all mysteries in ‘A Sort of Homecoming’. Even then only Calvin Lennox makes it, to finally confront the agent of all his woes and find the answers he’s been seeking…

Stylish, wry, moving, quirkily lyrical and inundated with iconic islands of popular culture, Dead Air is a beguiling puzzle picture and decidedly different love story which still packs a punch for fantasy fans and comics lovers to enjoy over and over again.
© 1989 M. Dalton Allred. All rights reserved.

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The Wild West Show


By Joe R. Lansdale, Lewis Shiner, Neal Barrett Jr., Sam Glanzman, Doug Potter & many and various. Edited by Richard Klaw (Mojo Press)
ISBN: 1-885418-04-3

Once upon a time, not that very long ago, nearly all of fiction was engorged with tales of Cowboys and Indians.

As always happens with such periodic popular phenomena – such as the Swinging Sixties’ Super-Spy Boom and the recent Vampire/Werewolf Boyfriend trend – there was a tremendous amount of momentary merit, lots of utter dross and a few spectacular gems.

Most importantly once such surges have petered out there’s also generally a small cadre of frustrated devotees who mourn its passing and, on growing up, resolve to do something to venerate or even revive their lost and faded favourite fad…

After World War II the American family entertainment market – for which read comics, radio and the burgeoning television industry – became comprehensively enamoured of the clear-cut, simplistic sensibilities and easy, escapist solutions offered by Tales of the Old West; already a firmly established favourite of paperback fiction, movie serials and feature films.

I’ve often pondered on how almost simultaneously a dark, bleak, nigh-nihilistic and oddly left-leaning Film Noir genre quietly blossomed alongside that wholesome revolution, seemingly for the cynical minority of entertainment intellectuals who somehow knew that the returned veterans still hadn’t found a Land Fit for Heroes… but that’s a thought for another time and different review.

Even though comic books had encompassed Western heroes from the very start – there were cowboy strips in the premier issues of both Action Comics and Marvel Comics – the post-war years saw a vast outpouring of anthology titles with new gun-toting heroes to replace the rapidly dwindling supply of costumed Mystery Men, and true to formula, most of these pioneers ranged from transiently mediocre to outright appalling.

With every comic-book publisher turning hopeful eyes westward, it was natural that most of the historical figures would quickly find a home and of course facts counted little, as indeed they never had with cowboy literature…

Despite minor re-flowerings in the early 1970s and mid-1990s, Cowboy comics have largely vanished from our funnybook pages: seemingly unable to command enough mainstream commercial support to survive the crushing competition of garish wonder-men and the furiously seductive future.

Europe and Britain also embraced the Sagebrush zeitgeist and produced some pretty impressive work, with France and Italy eventually making the genre their own by the end of the 1960s. They still make the best straight Western strips in the world.

Happily however an American revolution in comics retailing and print technologies at the end of the 20th century allowed fans to create and disseminate relatively inexpensive comicbooks of their own and, happier still, many of those fans are incredibly talented creators in other genres. A particularly impressive case in point is this captivating lost treasure from independent creator-led outfit Mojo Press, which published some amazing and groundbreaking horror, fantasy, Western and science fiction graphic novels and books between 1994 and their much-lamented demise in 1999.

Released in 1996, The Wild West Show was Mojo’s sixth release, a black and white anthology which celebrated the classical iconography of the genre whilst gleefully playing fast and loose with the content and running roughshod over the traditional mythology of the medium.

After the informative and educational ‘Two Fists, Four Colors and Six Guns’ – a history of Western comics by Scott A. Cupp – the wide-screen wonderment begins with Joe R. Lansdale’s beguiling short story ‘Trains Not Taken’ (adapted by Neal Barrett Jr. & John Garcia) as American Ambassador-to-Japan Bill Cody strikes up a casual conversation with businessman James Hickock on a Iron Horse trip to the Dakotas.

Among the many topics are the captivating single woman both find impossible to ignore, the Japanese/American union and recent massacre of a combined US Cavalry/Samurai force by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull,

The tragic loss of both Custer and Yoshii and other matters of great import pass the time, but the weary Hickock is too distracted to concentrate fully. His mind is filled with the troubles of his aging alcoholic wife and the disturbing dreams of another life: one where he was a buffalo hunting scout and deadly gunslinger. But those are just frustrating fancies of trains not taken. It’s all too late now – or is it…?

Lewis Shiner’s ‘Steam Engine Time’, illustrated by Doug Potter, is another glorious genre-bending snippet set in Austin, Texas in 1898, where an anonymous lad with a dream and a guitar tried to get the white folk interested in his new kind of music. Even though the far-more-welcoming Negroes in the Colored Quarter hadn’t heard of “The Blues” they accepted his unique squalling and bizarre pelvis-led dancing and understood his impatience. The kid wished that somehow he could get electricity into his guitar. Someday, maybe…

Veteran comics craftsman Sam Glanzman then turned in a silent masterpiece of action and bleak, black humour in ‘I Could Eat a Horse!’ after which Paul O. Miles and artists Newt Manwich & Michael Washburn adapted Donn Webb’s hilarious saga of a far from ordinary sidekick in ‘Cowboy Dharma’, whilst Norman Partridge & Marc Erickson revealed the West’s affinity for grotesque horror in the terrifying tale of The Head – but not much else – of murdering bandito Joaquin Murrieta in ‘For Neck or Nothin’…

Short and bittersweet, ‘Custer’s Last Love’ is a smart parable of the battle of the sexes from Steve Utley & Kevin Hendryx, and the whole shooting match ends on a lyrical high with the fact-based historical drama of settler Maggie Gosher whose ‘Letters from Arizona’ in 1889 are here transformed into a powerful and memorable strip by Joe Preston, John Lucas & Martin Thomas.

The Western tale has long been a part of world culture and perhaps that fact has relegated the genre in too many minds to the status of a passé fascination of a bygone generation. However these fresh looks at an overexposed idiom prove there’s still meat to found on those old bones, and cow-punching aficionados, fans of nostalgia-tainted comics and seekers of the wild and new alike can all be assured that there’s a selection of range-riding rollercoaster thrills and moody mysteries still lurking in those hills and on that horizon…

Black hats, white hats, alternate worlds, great pictures and macabre twists – what more could you possibly ask for?
The Wild West Show © 1996 Richard Klaw. All material contained herein © its respective creators. All rights reserved.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Dust Waltz


By Dan Brereton, Hector Gomez & Sandu Florea (Dark Horse/Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-057-4

Terrifying things are in our blood. Scary monsters, rabid maniacs, Armageddon, being stuck at school: all trigger our visceral, panicky fright, fight or flight response and thus always feature highly in our mass entertainments.

These days the slow-building tension and cerebral suspense of the genre has been largely overtaken and by shock-values and surprise action, with the mix liberally doused in a hot sauce of teen alienation, unrequited love and uncontrollable hormones – all making for a heady brew indeed.

This transition was very much the result of a clever, witty, breakthrough TV show and the long-lived comicbook tie-in which refocused the international zeitgeist, so here’s another look at Dark Horse Comics’ interpretation of the cult global mega-hit TV franchise Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Dark Horse won the strip licensing rights in the USA, subsequently producing an engaging regular series, a welter of impressive miniseries, original Graphic Novels, spin-offs and specials. Moreover, when the beloved TV iteration finally died, from 2007 on comics delivered creator Joss Whedon’s un-made continuity-canonical Season Eight and beyond to the faithful fans and followers.

In case you’ve lived in a bubble all this time: Buffy Summers was a clueless Valley Girl and hip teen cheerleader until she suddenly turned into a monster-killer: latest inheritor of a mystic, unpredictable genetic lottery which transformed mortal maids into human killing machines: Slayers.

Living in the small California hamlet of Sunnydale on the edge of a mystic portal – The Hellmouth – she and a close band of friends battled devils and demons and every sort of horror inexorably drawn to the area and who/what/which considered humanity a snack and Earth an eldritch “fiver-upper” opportunity.

The Dust Waltz, scripted by graphic horror maestro Dan Brereton and illustrated by Hector Gomez & Sandu Florea, was the initial comics offering, released in 1997 as a slim, full-colour, all-original graphic novel which firmly established the tone and timbre of the forthcoming series. The following year Titan Books reprinted the tale for the British market and – if you really need to know – the tale is set during TV Season 2 (which ran from Autumn 1997 to Spring 1998)…

It all begins in ‘Promenade’ as a brace of ancient vampiric horrors slowly cruise towards California and a showdown in sleepy Sunnydale, whilst at the local High School Buffy is still insolently resisting the stern admonitions of mentor Giles, a Watcher of the venerable cult tasked with training and assisting the Slayer in her anti-arcane endeavours.

A merciful interlude is offered when the Watcher invites Buffy and her gang – Willow, Xander and Cordelia – to accompany him to the Baytown Port to meet his niece Jane, imminently due to disembark from a world cruise.

It also offers the squad their first, albeit unsuspected, glimpse of Vampire “Old Ones” Lilith and Lamia, who have travelled to the Hellmouth with their puissant, bloodsucking Champions to indulge in a savage ritualistic combat dubbed the Dust Waltz…

Events kick into high gear that night when Buffy, on monster patrol with reformed vampire boyfriend Angel, encounter and destroy one of those ancient Champions.

Deprived of her weapon in the ritual, Lilith decides that Angel will be his replacement – whatever it takes…

In ‘Moondance’ the tension intensifies Buffy hunts for the vanished Angel, with Jane tagging along in defiance of Giles’ wishes. The Bloody Sisters have brought all manner of beasts and creatures with them, however, and soon the gang is captured and dragged to the Hellmouth even as the Watcher frantically tries to discover the true purpose of the dark ceremony…

Buffy however is far more direct and simply marches straight into the monsters’ midst to deal with the threat and free her friends “slayer-style” in the blistering action-packed eponymous conclusion ‘The Dust Waltz’.

Of course even after trashing the vampire hordes there’s the small problem of un-summoning the colossal elder god the battle has aroused…

Visually engaging, sharply scripted and proceeding at a breakneck rollercoaster pace, this smart and straightforward action-fest perfectly captures the brittle, intoxicating spirit of the TV series and remains an easily accessible romp even if you’re not familiar with the vast backstory: a creepy chronicle and torrid thriller as easily enjoyed by the most callow neophyte as by the dedicated devotee – and besides, with the shows readily available on TV and DVD, if you aren’t a follower yet you soon could – and should – be…
Buffy the Vampire Slayer ™ & © 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

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The Wasteland


By Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman (Piranha Press/DC Comics)
No ISBN, ASIN: B000UE4MBE

During the anything-goes 1980s the field of comics publishing expanded exponentially with new companies offering a vast range of fresh titles and ideas. To combat the upstart expansion, Marvel and DC also instigated innovative material for those freshly growing markets with the latter colossus especially targeting readers for whom old-fashioned funnybooks were anathema …or at least a long-abandoned childhood flirtation.

DC pioneered new, more mature-oriented niche imprints such as Vertigo and Helix, but undoubtedly some of the most intriguing treats came out of their Piranha Press line, formed in 1989 and re-designated Paradox Press in 1993.

When DC founded this off-key, adult special projects imprint, both the resultant releases and reader’s reaction to them were passionately mixed.

It had long been a Holy Grail of the business to produce comics for people who don’t read comics and, despite the inherent logical flaw, that’s a pretty sound and sensible plan, but the delivery is always problematic.

Is the problem resistance to the medium? Then try radical art or narrative styles, unusual design or typography, and use talent from outside the medium to fill your books: you get some intriguing results, but risk still not reaching a new audience whilst alienating those readers already on board…

This superbly eclectic and overwhelmingly effective collection partially mitigated that risk by using new creators with an already established pedigree outside the comics industry and material which had found a fan-base elsewhere in publishing…

It’s also was one of the best and most wickedly addictive books Piranha produced…

Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman had worked together since college, producing self-published illustrated stories which they sold direct to local bookstores. This led to a macabre and deliciously dark panel-gag series published in the L.A. Reader and movie magazine Fangoria and the creation of stunningly off-kilter, ironically post-modern and media-celebrated cartoon-fiction analect Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, which winningly combined outré, edgy domesticity with the aesthetic sensibilities of Jean Paul Sartre, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Charles Addams, Aubrey Beardsley and Gahan Wilson. It was not your average comicbook…

The Piranha Press experiment was always a tenuous dream in a cutthroat business, and though BSFUC was undoubtedly its greatest triumph – 41 delirious issues, some specials and a “Best Of” collection – the imprint was radically restructured in 1992 and Dave and Dan moved on and out to Hollywood.

Before they finally left, however, the company published also The Wasteland: a compilation – with some new material – of that aforementioned gag feature…

Produced as a single captioned panel, the strip offered the trademarked weird ideas and compelling, alluring prose rendered (sur)real via lovely, sketchy, scratchy, frantically evocative monochrome illustrations with the same skewed worldview, supplemented with a heaping helping of mordant Gary Larson wryness added to the mix.

There’s no point my trying to relate the contents of this superb, tragically out-of-print but mercifully still available tome: 128 pages of graphic imagery blending the cute with the grotesque, the mundane with the bizarre and the unexpected with the cheerily distasteful which you just have to see to believe.

All I can do here is tease you with a few atypically typical sample subject-lines such as ‘Men without Women meet Dogs without Snouts’, ‘The Little Cyclops Puppy Nobody Would Play With’, ‘Cheerleaders on Fire’, ‘Lover’s Hop, for the Less-than-Devastated’, ‘The Substitute Executioner’, ‘My Dinner with Medusa’, ‘Jump-Starting the Dog’, ‘We Got Along Swimmingly Once I Learned They Hated Me’, ‘A Day at the Nun Jousts’ ‘Rudolph the Red Light Reindeer’, ‘Zero-Gravity Autopsy’, ‘The Gas Chambermaid’ and ‘Rumble Monks’, and rest assured that some of you will now be unable to rest until you experience the sheer creative anarchy for yourselves…

Happy Easter, comic fans…
The Wastelands © 1989 Dave Louapre & Dan Sweetman. All Rights Reserved.

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Clubbing


By Andi Watson & Josh Howard (Minx/Titan Books edition)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-580-4

In 2007 DC comics had a worthy go at building new markets by creating the Minx imprint: dedicated to producing comics material for the teen/young adult audience – especially the ever-elusive girl readership – that had embraced translated manga material, momentous global comics successes such as Maus and Persepolis and those abundant and prolific fantasy serials which produced such pop phenomena as Roswell High, Twilight and even Harry Potter.

Sadly after only a dozen immensely impressive and decidedly different graphic novels Minx shut up shop in October 2008, markedly NOT citing publishing partner Random House’s failure to get the books onto the appropriate shelves of major bookstore chains as the reason.

Nevertheless the books which were published are still out there and most of them are well worth tracking down – either in the US originals or the British editions published by Titan Books.

One of the most engaging was Clubbing, from Andi Watson & Josh Howard, which stylishly and wittily blended teen rebellion and shopping-culture insouciance with murder-mystery and supernatural horror in an audacious and winning black and white, cross-cultural romantic romp in Wordsworth Country…

Charlotte Brook has been a bad girl. London’s most self-absorbed fashionista, social butterfly and shopping diva, “Lottie” got caught using a homemade fake I.D. to get into an out-of-bounds West End nightclub and ended up coming home in a police car…

Her outraged but rather disinterested parents simply bundled her off for the summer to the wilds of the Lake District where her dull grandfather and good old Grandma Aggie are going to put her to work in their new Golf resort.

Faced with the dire prospect of months of rain, no Wi-Fi coverage, Golf, Women’s Institute do’s, old people, hicks and yokels, golf and mud and golf, Lottie is far from happy, but as always Aggie’s ubiquitous cakes and cuppas go some small way towards assuaging the agony.

Granddad Archie Fitz-Talbot‘s time is constantly taken up with the on-going and behind schedule conversion of his posh old country club into a major modern sport and leisure venue and, after only one wind-blown, rain-sodden tour in the most fabulous outfit from her stylishly inappropriate wardrobe, Lottie realises that she’s actually in hell.

Her poor beloved shoes are all doomed too…

The local teens are a dire lot, rough, rude and pretentious; more interested in gore, blood and faux Satanism rather than music and fashion – like any self-respecting Goth should be – and as for the nice young man Aggie is trying to set her up with, Lottie wouldn’t be seen dead with a guy who loves fishing and golf no matter how good looking he is…

Howard is the least of her problems. In their affable, comfortable way, Archie and Aggie are determined to torture her to death: they feed her wholesome stodgy food, drag her all over the place on walks and trips through the beautiful countryside, take her to W.I. galas and, horror of horrors, ask her to work in the gift-shop with ghastly golf pro Tom Hutchinson – at least until she accidentally burns it down…

Things get decidedly strange after Lottie clashes with officious wizened-ancient employee Mrs. Geraldine Gibbons over towels in the gym, and again at a W.I. cake-baking contest. The old biddy has a real bee in her bonnet and babbles on about secrets and hidden truths and is clearly bingo-wing bonkers…

Lottie begins to suspect otherwise when she and the slowly growing in coolness Howard find the old bat’s strangely mutilated body in a water-hazard on the Links…

Some of those sinister secrets start to emerge when the shaken teen then discovers old Archie is a bit of a player – Urgh! wrinklies indulging in illicit lurrve – and might need to get rid of the occasional octogenarian bit of rough, but something just doesn’t add up and before long Lottie and Howard are grudgingly, disbelievingly swept into a bizarre and baffling mystery with demonic cults, a horrific monster menace from beyond Reality and staggering personal implications for Lottie and her entire family…

Clubbing is a sharp, witty, subtly funny and intriguing coming of age horror-thriller-comedy which follows all the rules of the teen romance genre yet manages to inject a huge helping of novelty and individual character into the mix: a perfect vehicle for attracting to our medium new and youthful readers with no abiding interest in outlandish power-fantasies or vicarious vengeance-gratification – and yes, that does mean girls…

This snazzy so-British reading rave also includes ‘Lottie’s Lexicon’: a cool guide to speaking young Londoner, full creator biographies and three tantalising preview segments from other tempting MINX titles.

Track them all down and enjoy a genuinely different kind of comic book…
© 2007 Andi Watson and DC Comics. All rights reserved.

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Supernatural: Origins


By Peter Johnson, Geoff Johns, Matthew Don Smith & various (WildStorm)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-754-7

Comicbooks have always enjoyed a long, successful affiliation and nigh-symbiotic relationship with television, but in these days when even the ubiquitous goggle-box business is paralysed and endangered by on-demand streaming, too many channels and far too much choice, the numbers and types of program that migrate to funnybooks is increasingly limited.

Excluding kids’ animation shows, cult fantasy adventure series now predominate in this dwindling arena and one of the best to make that transition to the printed page was the epic monster-fighting saga of two brothers literally on the road to Hell as they tracked down unnatural horrors, mystical malignancies and all the unexplainable things that treat humanity as fair game and delicious delicacies…

Over eight seasons since 2006, the TV series Supernatural has followed Sam and Dean Winchester whose lives were forever changed when a yellow-eyed demon killed their mother.  The horrific event drove their distraught father into a life of eternal wandering: stalking and killing the impossible beasts and horrors he now knew lurked in every shadow.

Years after growing up from a baby on the road to hell, Sam got out of the life and tried to live a normal existence but was eventually dragged back when disaffected, alienated brother Dean called to say that their father had gone missing. It happened right about the time Sam’s girlfriend was killed by a fiery demon…

This impressive official prequel to the TV show follows the dysfunctional Winchester family in the days, months and years after the boys’ mother floated up into the air and spontaneously combusted, leaving father John with unanswerable questions, a hunger for vengeance and two unnatural kids to raise…

After Mary’s death, John packs little Dean and baby Sam into his car and goes into a spin of booze and bar-fights, until he meets palm-reader Missouri Mosley. The prognosticator offers veiled answers and a glimpse into a world of mumbo-jumbo which is proven to be impossibly real when an unseen monster kills Mary’s best friend Julie, who had been babysitting the traumatised boys. Lodged in her ghastly remains was a huge rune-carved fang from no creature ever born on Earth…

Armed with only hints into the true nature of the world, the former marine begins a quest for the tooth’s owner and in Tempe, Arizona meets prickly, reclusive outré scholar Fletcher Gable who identifies it as belonging to a Black Shuck… a Hellhound.

Sending Winchester on to a reported sighting of such in California, the savant offers a further gift: a blank journal in which to record all the notes, photos, clippings, drawings, thoughts and experiences that will inevitably occur now that father and sons are irrevocably set on their particular road to Perdition…

The wise man and his latest student are both painfully unaware that Winchester is himself being hunted…

When Mary’s formidable brother Jacob comes looking for the boys and fearing the worst (although he has no idea of what the can worst actually be), he too becomes embroiled in the quest – to his eternal regret – and only the arrival of the mysterious shadower saves John from becoming the latest casualty of the hellhound…

“Hunter” – more a job description than his name – helps Winchester clear up the mess and cover up the evidence before introducing the now-doubly bereaved and shell-shocked single parent to the full horror of the hidden world of the Supernatural. It’s 1983 and all Hell’s breaking loose…

Soon Winchester is part of an amorphous hidden association of loners known as Hunters: mortals who’ve lost loved ones, seen the truth and had the guts to look for payback…

Partnered with his brusque and enigmatic mentor, John Winchester is still looking for a golden eyed demon and a hellhound with a missing fang as he tackles his first monster – a leaping carnivore known as a “Heeler” with Hunter and another clean-up man named Ichi.

However by the time the trio return to the grimly unique bar known as Harvelle’s Roadhouse where Sam and Dean have been waiting under the lethally efficient care of waitress Ellen, John is a full-blooded monster killer. Good thing too, as Ichi isn’t friendly or human anymore…

Thus begins the perilous pattern: John and Hunter dumping the kids on someone blithely oblivious or horribly in on the secret for a few days whilst they take care of business and that journal filling up with accounts of incredible horror.

Winchester is a fast learner and, after meeting a resurrected priest who gives him a few precious tainted moments with Mary’s spirit, he and his extremely hands-on senior partner revisit Fletcher Gable with some useful intel on the rune-carved fang. Before long they’re heading to one of the spookiest locations in American geography for an appalling gauntlet of terrors, a confrontation with the hellhound, its master, inevitable betrayal and an explanation for all that the bereaved father and his sons have endured…

Dotted with moving, telling “flashbacks” such as the moment in 1991 when even tough, independent and lethally dangerous Dean had enough and tried to run away, abandoning his dad and little brother to an interminable legion of monsters, this initial chronicle also includes a short tale of the boys by Geoff Johns, Phil Hester & colourist JD Mettler.

‘Speak No Evil’ harks back to a day in 1989 when the taciturn Sam asked his big brother just how their mother died. He might even have received an answer if a demon hadn’t smashed through the motel window just then, locked in a death grip with their father…

This rip-snorting, tense and moody thriller lives up to the demands of the dedicated TV following and still fulfils all that’s demanded of a horror comic for readers who haven’t followed the torturous trail of the Winchesters, and this chilling compendium even offers in-process views of covers by Tim Sale and pin-ups, working drawings and sketches by series illustrator Matthew Dow Smith.

Punchy, powerful and spookily addictive…
Compilation and sketchbook © 2008 Warner Bros Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. Supernatural and all characters, distinctive likenesses and related elements are ™ Warner Bros Entertainment, Inc.

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Black Hole


By Charles Burns (JonathanCape)
ISBN: 978-0-22407-778-1

One of the most impressive and justifiably lauded graphic novels ever, Black Hole is a powerfully evocative allegorical horror story about sex, youth and transformation, but don’t let that deter you from reading it. It’s also a clever, moving, chilling and even uplifting tale that displays the bravura mastery of one of the greatest exponents of sequential narrative the English language has ever produced.

Originally released as a 12-issue limited series under the aegis of Kitchen Sink Press, the tale was rescued and completed through Fantagraphics when the pioneering Underground publisher folded in 1999. On completion Black Hole was promptly released in book form by Pantheon Press in 2005, although many fans and critics despaired at the abridged version which left out many of Burns’ most potent full-page character studies of the deeply troubled cast – an error of economy corrected in subsequent editions.

It has won eleven of the comic world’s most prestigious awards.

It’s the 1970s in Seattle, and there’s something very peculiar happening amongst the local teenagers out in the safe secure suburbs. In ‘Biology 101’, Keith Pearson can’t concentrate on properly dissecting his frog because his lab partner is Chris Rhodes, the veritable girl of his dreams.

Trying to keep cool only makes things worse and when he suddenly slips into a fantastic psychedelic daydream the swirling images resolve into a horrific miasma of sex, torn flesh and a sucking void.

Suddenly he’s regaining consciousness on the floor with the entire class standing over him. They’re all laughing at him… all except Chris…

‘Planet Xeno’ is a quiet patch of woodland adults don’t know about, where the kids can kick back, drink, smoke, get stoned and talk. The big topic among the guys is “the bug”, a sexually transmitted disease that causes bizarre, unpredictable mutations: uncontrolled growths, extra digits, pigmentation changes, new orifices that don’t bleed…

As Keith and best buds Dee and Todd shoot the breeze and goof off they discover an odd encampment, strewn with old toys and bottles and junk. Some of the sufferers of the “Teen Plague” have relocated here to the forest, founding a makeshift camp away from prying eyes and wagging tongues…

When Keith finds a girl’s shed skin hanging from a bush he fears the creepy mutants are closing in and suffers a crazy disorienting premonition…

Chris is dreaming in ‘SSSSSSSSSS’, a ghastly phantasmagoria that involves naked swimming in pollution, a load of strange guys, monsters and that fainting kid Keith turning into a serpent. It all ends with her examining the new holes in her body before ripping off her old skin and leaving it hanging on a bush…

She’s drinking illicit beer by the lake in ‘Racing Towards Something’, remembering that wild party a week ago and what she did with the cool guy Rob Facincanni. As she came on to him he kept trying to tell her something but she was in no mood to listen. She just didn’t want to be the good girl anymore…

She then recalls the moment of explosive climax and horror when she discovered the hideous second mouth in his neck and the noises. It seemed to be speaking…

In the sordid guilty aftermath she felt awful but had no idea what that furtive, disappointing assignation had done to her…

Rob is still sleeping with Lisa. She’s accepted the cost of the curse and the ghastly changes in her body but what she won’t take is him screwing around. She has heard Rob’s second mouth talking as they lay together and needs to know ‘Who’s Chris?’

Keith and his friends are getting stoned again when he hears that some guys have just watched the so-virginal Chris skinny-dipping and seen her sex-caused mutation. The virgin queen isn’t any more…

In ‘Cut’ their teasing proves too much and he storms off into the scrub and accidentally spots the object of his desire getting dressed again. Guiltily voyeuristic, he’s prompted to action when she steps on broken glass and cries out.

Dashing to her rescue he bandages her foot, too ashamed to admit just how much of her he’s really seen. All Keith knows is that someday he will be with her. Fate was obviously on his side…

‘Bag Action’ finds him and Dee trying to buy weed from a bunch of skeevy college guys, but the frustrated romantic is utterly unable to get lascivious, furtive, distracting naked images of Chris out of his mind.

However, after sampling some of the dope in the Frat boys’ dilapidated house, he meets their housemate Eliza, an eccentric artist extremely high, nearly naked and very hungry…

Just as baked, achingly horny and fascinated by her cute tail (not a euphemism), Keith almost has sex with her but is interrupted by his idiot pal at just the wrong moment…

Many of those infected by The Bug have camped out in the woods now and ‘Cook Out’ finds them having a desperate party around a roaring fire. Rob is there, bemoaning the fact that Lisa has kicked him out but he’s also acutely aware that the sex-warped kids are getting oddly wild, manic, even dangerous…

‘Seeing Double’ finds the devastated Chris talking things over with Rob at the outcast’s encampment. The naive fool has just discovered what’s she got and what it means. Lost and disgusted, convinced that she’s a dirty monster with a biological Scarlet Letter that is part of her flesh she drinks and talks and, eventually, finds comfort in her bad boy’s arms…

In ‘Windowpane’ Pearson, Dee and Todd drop their first tabs of acid and head for a party at Jill‘s house. The increasingly morose and troubled Keith is feeling ever more isolated and alienated and the LSD coursing through his system isn’t helping, When Dee and Jill start to make out, he leaves and finds her big sister crying outside. After she shouts at him he turns and, still tripping off his nut, heads into the woods.

Lost and confused, he sees horrific and bizarre things in the trees and bushes before stumbling into some of the infected kids around their fire. In a wave of expiation he begins to talk and keeps on going, slowly coming down amongst temporary friends. Keith has no suspicion that some of the things he saw were not imaginary at all…

‘Under Open Skies’ finds Chris and Rob playing hooky. Fully committed to each other now, they head to the coast and a perfect solitary day of love at the beach. They think it’s all going to be okay but the voice from Rob’s other mouth tells them otherwise…

Back home again, Chris’ recent good times are ruined by her parents’ reaction. Grounded, the former good girl makes up her mind and, gathering a few possessions, elopes with her lover to a new life in ‘The Woods’ where the grotesquely bestial but kindly Dave Barnes takes them under his wing.

Although they have bonded, Rob cannot stay with Chris but returns to his home and High School. Although he spends as much time as he can at the encampment, Chris is too often alone and on one of her excursions into the wilds finds a bizarre and frightening shrine.

Little does she know it’s one of the things the tripping Keith thought he had hallucinated…

Summer moves on and Pearson plucks up the nerve to go back to the college guys’ house. ‘Lizard Queen’ Eliza is on the porch, drawing but obviously upset by something. Confused, scared and without knowing what they’re doing they end up in bed, consummating that long-postponed act of drug-fuelled passion…

Chris’ days of innocent passion end suddenly when Rob is horrifically attacked by a lurking intruder in ‘I’m Sorry’ and she descends into a stupor for days until she spots nice safe Keith at one of the camp’s evening bonfire parties. Soon he’s arranged for her to move into an empty property he’s housesitting for ‘Summer Vacation’ but even though he’s attentive, kind, solicitous and so clearly wants to be with her, he’s just not Rob.

Chris has been going slowly crazy since her beloved boy vanished: reliving memories good and bad, feeling scared and abandoned, playing dangerously with the gun he left her “for protection”…

Keith is still plagued by nightmares and X-rated thoughts of Eliza in ‘A Dream Girl’ but hopeful that he has a chance with Chris, now. That swiftly changes when he checks on her and discovers that the house he’s supposed to be guarding has been trashed. There’s garbage everywhere, a bunch of her fellow outcasts have moved in and she’s clearly avoiding him, locked in a room, constantly “sleeping”…

Despondent and confused, Pearson doesn’t know what to do. Chris is having some kind of breakdown and the house – his responsibility – is a wreck. The lovesick fool is trapped and crumbling when Eliza breezes back into his life. If only his own bug mutation wasn’t so hideous…

Heading back to the home once more he finds that Chris has gone and the pigsty has become a charnel house…

Throughout the summer there has been a frightening, oppressive presence in the woods and with the Fall coming the mood is beginning to darken. When Dave is barracked and abused whilst trying to buy takeout food he snaps and pulls out Chris’ gun. Calmly taking his fried chicken from the crime-scene he walks back to the woods and the troubled soul known as ‘Rick the Dick’. It’s going to be their last meal…

Keith meanwhile has found his own happy ending ‘Driving South’ with the gloriously free and undemanding Eliza, but is still focussed on what he found at the house. At least he and Eliza helped the survivors get away, but now happily content with his idyllic artist girl and after all the horrible secrets they’ve shared, he can’t help wondering what happened to Chris…

That mystery and how Dave got the gun are only revealed in the compulsively low key and wildly visual climax of ‘The End’…

Complex, convoluted and utterly compelling, expressive, evocative and deeply, disturbingly phantasmagorical, Black Hole is a genuine comics masterpiece which applies graphic genius and astoundingly utilises allegory, metaphor, the dissatisfaction and alienation of youth, evolution and cultural ostracization as well as the eternal verities of love, aspiration, jealousy and death to concoct a tale no other medium could (although perhaps Luis Buñuel, David Lynch or David Cronenberg might have made a good go of it in film).

If you are over 16 and haven’t read it, do – and soon.
© 2005 Charles Burns. All rights reserved.

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Showcase Presents Secrets of Sinister House


By Jack Oleck, Frank Robbins, Sheldon Mayer, Robert Kanigher, Tony DeZuniga, Alex Toth, Mike Sekowsky, Alex Niño, Sergio Aragonés & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-2626-8

American comicbooks just idled along rather slowly until the invention of Superman provided a flamboyant new genre of heroes and subsequently unleashed a torrent of creative imitation and imaginative generation for a suddenly thriving and voracious new entertainment model.

Implacably vested in World War II, these Overmen swept all before them until the troops came home. As the decade closed, however, more traditional themes and heroes resurfaced and eventually supplanted the Fights ‘n’ Tights crowd.

Whilst a new generation of kids began buying and collecting, many of the first fans also retained their four-colour habit but increasingly sought more mature themes in their reading matter. The war years had irrevocably altered the psychological landscape of the readership and as a more world-weary, cynical young public came to see that all the fighting and dying hadn’t really changed anything, their chosen forms of entertainment (film, theatre and prose as well as comics) increasingly reflected this.

As well as Western, War and Crime comics, celebrity tie-ins, madcap escapist comedy and anthropomorphic funny animal features were immediately resurgent, but gradually another of the cyclical revivals of spiritualism and a public fascination with the arcane led to a wave of impressive, evocative and shockingly addictive horror comics.

There had been grisly, gory and supernatural stars before, including a pantheon of ghosts, monsters and wizards draped in mystery-man garb and trappings (the Spectre, Mr. Justice, Sgt. Spook, Frankenstein, The Heap, Sargon the Sorcerer, Zatara, Zambini the Miracle Man, Kardak the Mystic, Dr. Fate and dozens of others), but these had been victims of circumstance: The Unknown as a power source for super-heroics. Now the focus shifted to ordinary mortals thrown into a world beyond their ken with the intention of unsettling, not vicariously empowering, the reader.

Almost every publisher jumped on the increasingly popular bandwagon, with B & I (which became the magical one-man-band Richard E. Hughes’ American Comics Group) launching the first regularly published horror comic in the Autumn of 1948, although their Adventures Into the Unknown was technically pipped by Avon.

The book and comics publisher had released an impressive single issue entitled Eerie in January 1947 but didn’t follow-up with a regular series until 1951. Classics Illustrated had already secured the literary end of the medium with child-friendly comics adaptations of the Headless Horseman, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (both 1943), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1944) and Frankenstein (1945) among others.

If we’re keeping score this was also the period in which Joe Simon & Jack Kirby identified another “mature market” gap and invented Romance comics (Young Romance #1, September 1947) but they too saw the sales potential for spooky material, resulting in the seminal Black Magic (launched in 1950) and boldly obscure psychological drama anthology Strange World of Your Dreams (1952).

The company that would become DC Comics bowed to the inevitable and launched a comparatively straight-laced anthology that nevertheless became one of their longest-running and most influential titles with the December 1951/January 1952 launch of The House of Mystery.

After the hysterical censorship debate which led to witch-hunting Senate hearings in the early 1950s was curtailed by the industry adopting a castrating straitjacket of self-regulation, titles produced under the aegis of the Comics Code Authority were sanitised and anodyne affairs in terms of Shock and Gore, but the audience’s appetite for suspense was still high and in 1956 National introduced sister titles Tales of the Unexpected and House of Secrets.

Stories were soon dialled back from uncanny spooky phenomenon yarns to always marvellously illustrated, rationalistic fantasy-adventure vehicles and eventually straight monster-busting Sci Fi tales which dominated the market until the 1960s.

That’s when super-heroes – which had begun to revive after Julius Schwartz began the Silver Age of comics by reintroducing the Flash in Showcase #4 – finally overtook them.

Green Lantern, Hawkman, the Atom and a growing coterie of costumed cavorters generated a gaudy global bubble of masked mavens which forced even dedicated anthology suspense titles to transform into super-character books. Even ACG slipped tights and masks onto its spooky stars.

When the caped crusader craziness peaked and popped, superheroes began dropping like Kryptonite-gassed flies. However nothing combats censorship better than falling profits and, at the end of the 1960s with the cape-and-cowl boom over and some of the industry’s most prestigious series circling the drain, the surviving publishers of the field agreed on revising the Comics Code, loosening their self-imposed restraints against crime and horror comics.

Nobody much cared about gangster titles but, as the liberalisation coincided with yet another bump in public interest in supernatural themes, the resurrection of scary stories was a foregone conclusion and obvious “no-brainer.” Even ultra-wholesome Archie Comics re-entered the field with their rather tasty line of Red Circle Chillers…

Thus, with absolutely no fanfare at all spooky comics came back to quickly dominate the American funnybook market for more than half a decade. DC led the pack by converting The House of Mystery and Tales of the Unexpected into mystery-suspense anthologies in 1968 and resurrected House of Secrets a year earlier.

However horror wasn’t the only classic genre to experience renewed interest. Westerns, war, adventure and love-story comicbooks also reappeared and, probably influenced by the overwhelming success of the supernatural TV soap Dark Shadows, the industry mixed a few classic idioms and invented gothic horror/romances. The mini-boom generated Haunted Love from Charlton, Gothic Romances from Atlas/Seaboard and from undisputed industry leader National/DC Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love and Sinister House of Secret Love.

The 52-page Sinister House of Secret Love launched with an October/November 1971 cover-date, offering book-length graphic epics in the manner of gothic romances such as Jane Eyre, before transforming into a more traditional anthology package as Secrets of Sinister House with #5 (June/July 1972) and reducing to the traditional 36-page format with the next issue. The format remained until its cancellation with #18 in June/July 1974.

In keeping with the novel enterprise, the dark, doomed love stories were extra-long affairs such as the 25-page Victorian period chiller ‘The Curse of the MacIntyres’ (by Mary Skrenes & Don Heck) which opened issue #1 and recounted how recently-bereaved Rachel lost her scientist father and fell under the guardianship of her cousin Blair. Moving into his remote Scottish castle she readily befriended Blair’s son Jamie but could not warm to the dwarfish cousin Alfie.

As the days and weeks passed however she became increasingly disturbed by the odd household and the family’s obsessive interest in “mutations”…

There was even room for a short back-up and the Jane Eyre pastiche was nicely balanced by a contemporary yarn of hippies in love. Undying passion and ghostly reincarnation in ‘A Night to Remember – A Day to Forget!’ by an unknown author, effectively illustrated by John Calnan & Vince Colletta.

Editor Joe Orlando and scripter Len Wein closely collaborated on the Tony DeZuniga limned ‘To Wed the Devil’ in the next issue, wherein beautiful, innocent Sarah returns to her father’s estate and discovers the place to be a hotbed of Satanism where all the old servants indulge in black magic rituals.

Moreover her father is forcing her to abandon true love Justin and wed the appalling and terrifying Baron Luther Dumont of Bohemia to settle an outstanding debt. This grim bodice-ripper tale saw the return of Victorian devil-busting duo Father John Christian and Rabbi Samuel Shulman who appeared far too infrequently in succeeding years (see also Showcase Presents the House of Secrets volume 1 and Showcase Presents the Phantom Stranger volume 2) whose last-minute ministrations saved the day, quelled an unchecked evil and of course provided the obligatory Happy Ever After…

Sinister House of Secret Love #3 was the most impressive of these early issues and ‘Bride of the Falcon’ was a visual feast from Alex Toth, Frank Giacoia & Doug Wildey, as author Frank Robbins detailed a thoroughly modern-day mystery. American proof-reader Kathy Harwood answers one of the Lonely Hearts ads in her own magazine and finds herself in Venice, Italy, trapped on the isolated Isola Tranquillo with the tragic, scarred and lovelorn heartsick Count Lorenzo Di Falco and his paralysed mother.

Something isn’t right, though, and as the wedding day approaches, a series of inexplicable deaths occurs. Soon, the romance-obsessed dreamer realises she is in deadly danger. Luckily, poor but handsome gondolier Roberto has constantly refused her demands that he stop bothering her…

The gripping psychological thriller is supplanted by prose ghostly romance ‘Will I Ever See You Again’ illustrated by Jack Sparling…

‘Kiss of the Serpent’ by Mary DeZuniga, Michael Fleisher & Tony DeZuniga in #4 takes us to Bombay (you can call it Mumbai if you’re feeling modern and PC) where freshly orphaned teacher Michelle Harlinson has taken a job arranged by her uncle Paul.

Dazed by loss and the sheer exoticism of India, she is soon drawn into a terrible vendetta between her gorgeous wealthy employer Rabin Singh and his jealous brother Jawah. But as the American finds herself falling under the seductive sway of Rabin, she uncovers a history of murder and macabre snake-worship that can only end in more death and heartbreak…

With the next extra-sized issue the title became Secrets of Sinister House (June/July 1972), and Lynn Marron, Fleisher, Mike Sekowsky & Dick Giordano produced the eerie ‘Death at Castle Dunbar’ where modern American Miss Mike Hollis is invited to the desolate Scottish manse to complete a history of Clan Dunbar. However most of the family and staff are inexplicably hostile, even though they are unaware of the writer’s true agenda…

Mike’s sister Valerie was married to the Laird Sir Alec and apparently drowned in an accident. The author is even more convinced when, whilst snooping in the darkened midnight halls, she meet’s Val’s ghost…

Certain of murder, Mike probes deeper uncovering a deeply-concealed scandal and mystery, becoming a target herself. However when there are so many suspects and no one to trust, how long could it be before she joins her sibling in the spirit world?

In #6 the transition to a standard horror-anthology was completed with the introduction of a schlocky comedic host/raconteur along the lines of Cain, Abel and the Mad Mod Witch.

Charity offered her laconic first ‘Welcome to Sinister House’ (presumably scripted by Editor Orlando and illustrated by the astonishingly gifted Michael Wm. Kaluta), before pioneering industry legend Sheldon Mayer – who would briefly act as lead writer for the title – replaced romance with mordant terror and gallows humour by asking ‘When is Tomorrow Yesterday?‘ (art by Alfredo Alcala) for a genre-warping tale of time-travelling magic and medicine.

‘Brief Reunion!’ by John Albano, Ed Ramos & Mar Amongo showed a hitman the inescapable consequences of his life, and veterans Robert Kanigher & Bill Draut showed a murdering wife that Karma was a vengeful bitch in ‘The Man Hater’.

Issue #7 began with ‘Panic!’ by Mayer and the sublimely talented Nestor Redondo, who together taught a mobster’s chiselling bookkeeper a salient lesson about messing with girls who know magic, Sergio Aragonés opened an occasional gag feature of ‘Witch’s Tails’ and Mayer & June Lofamia futilely warned a student taking ship for America ‘As Long as you Live… Stay Away from Water!’

Sam Glanzman then illustrated Mayer’s twice-told tale of ghostly millennial vengeance in ‘The Hag’s Curse and the Hamptons’ Revenge!’ before cartoonist Lore Shoberg took a turn at the ‘Witch’s Tails’ to end the issue.

‘The Young Man Who Cried Werewolf Once Too Often’ illustrated by Draut in #8 found a most modern manner of dealing with lycanthropes, after which Maxene Fabe & Ruben Yandoc’s ‘Playing with Fire’ saw a bullied boy find a saurian pal to fix all his problems and E. Nelson Bridwell & Alex Niño again featured a wolf-man – but one who mistakenly believed lunar travel would solve his dilemma during a ‘Moonlight Bay’…

Secrets of Sinister House #9 showed what could happen if impatient obnoxious neighbours were crazy enough to ‘Rub a Witch the Wrong Way!’ (Mayer & Abe Ocampo), and Kanigher & Rico Rival revealed ‘The Dance of the Damned’, wherein an ambitious ballerina learned to regret stealing the shoes and glory of her dead idol, before Jack Oleck & Rival depicted obsessive crypto-zoologists learning a hard lesson and little else whilst hunting ‘The Abominable Snowman’…

In #10 Steve Skeates & Alcala’s ‘Castle Curse’ saw a family torn apart by vulpine heredity, whilst Gerry Taloac’s ‘The Cards Never Lie!’ saw a gang turf war end badly because nobody would listen to a fortune teller, and a greedy hunchback went too far and learned too much in his drive to surpass his magician master in ‘Losing his Head!’ by Larry Hama, Neal Adams & Rich Buckler.

Following another Kaluta ‘Welcome to Sinister House’, Fabe & Yandoc crafted a period tale of greedy adventure and just deserts in ‘The Monster of Death Island’, after which all modern man’s resources were unable to halt the shocking rampage of ‘The Enemy’ (by persons unknown). More Aragonés ‘Witch’s Tails’ then preceded an horrific history lesson of the 18th century asylum dubbed ‘Bedlam’ by John Jacobson, Kanigher & Niño and generations of benighted, deluded exploited souls…

Sekowsky & Wayne Howard led off in #12 with the salutary tale of a greedy, ruthless furrier who became to his horror ‘A Very Cold Guy’, after which Oleck & Niño explored ‘The Ultimate Horror’ of a hopeless paranoid whilst, following more Aragonés ‘Witch’s Tails’, Bridwell & Alcala adapted W. F. Harvey’s classic chiller of ravening insanity ‘August Heat’.

Shock and awe was the order of the day in #13 when giant animals attack a horrified family in the decidedly deceptive ‘Deadly Muffins’ by Albano & Alcala, whereas Oleck & Niño wryly combined nuclear Armageddon and vampires in ‘The Taste of Blood’, before Albano & Jess Jodloman wrapped everything up with a nasty parable about great wealth and prognostication in ‘The Greed Inside’.

‘The Man and the Snake’ was another Bridwell & Alcala adaptation, this time depicting Ambrose Bierce’s mesmerising tale of mystery and imagination, but the original thrillers in #14 were just as good. In ‘The Roommate’ by Fred Wolfe, Sekowsky & Draut, a college romance is destroyed by a girl with an incredible secret whilst ‘The Glass Nightmare’ by Fleisher & Alcala taught an opportunistic thief and killer the reason why you shouldn’t take what isn’t yours…

Issue #15 began with ‘The Claws of the Harpy’ (Fleisher & Sparling), wherein a very human murdering monster reaped a whirlwind of retribution, followed up with Oleck & Romy Gamboa’s proof that there are more cunning hunters than vampires in ‘Hunger’ and culminating with a surprisingly heart-warming and sentimental fable in Albano & Jodloman’s ‘Mr. Reilly the Derelict!’

Despite the tone of the times, Secrets of Sinister House was not thriving. The odd mix of quirky tales and artistic experimentation couldn’t secure a regular audience, and a sporadic release schedule exacerbated the problems. Sadly the last few issues, despite holding some of the best original material and a few fabulous reprints, were seen by hardly any readers and the series vanished with #18.

Still, they’re here in all their wonderful glory and well worth the price of admission on their own.

An uncredited page of supernatural facts opens #16, after which George Kashdan & Don Perlin proffered a tale of feckless human intolerance and animal fidelity in ‘Hound You to Your Grave’, whilst the superb Vicente Alcazar traced the career of the infamous 18th century sorcerer the Count of St. Germain who proudly boasted ‘No Coffin Can Hold Me’ (possibly scripted by Leo Dorfman?), before Kashdan returned with newcomer Ernie Chan to recount the sinister saga of the world’s most inhospitable caravan in ‘The Haunted House-Mobile’.

Perhaps ironic in choice as lead #17’s ‘Death’s Last Rattle’ (Kashdan & the uniquely marvellous Ramona Fradon) combined terror with sardonic laughs as a corpse went on trial for his afterlife, even as an innocent living man was facing a jury for the dead man’s murder, whilst ‘Strange Neighbor’ by Howard Chaykin and ‘Corpse Comes on Time’ from Win Mortimer told classic quickie terror tales in a single page each.

To close the issue, the editor raided the vaults for one of the company’s oldest scary sagas.

‘Johnny Peril: Death Has Five Guesses’ by Kanigher, Giacoia & Sy Barry was first seen in Sensation Mystery #112 (November/December 1952) and pitted the perennial two-fisted trouble-shooter against a mystery maniac in a chamber of horrors. But was Karl Kandor just a deranged actor or something else entirely?

The curtain fell with #18, combining Kashdan & Calnan’s all-new ‘The Strange Shop on Demon Street’ – featuring a puppet-maker, marauding thugs and arcane cosmic justice – with a selection of reprints. From 1969 ‘Mad to Order’ by Murphy Anderson was another one page punch-liner and Dave Wood – as D.W. Holtz – & Angel B. Luna offered New Year’s Eve enchantment in ‘The Baby Who Had But One Year to Die’, whilst ‘The House that Death Built’, by Dorfman & Jerry Grandenetti, saw plundering wreckers rap the watery doom for their perfidy.

Once again the best was left till last as ‘The Half-Lucky Charm!’ by an unknown writer and artists Gil Kane & Bernard Sachs from Sensation Mystery #115 (May 1953) followed a poor schmuck who could only afford to buy 50% of Cagliostro’s good luck talisman and found his fortune and life were being reshaped accordingly…

With superbly experimental and evocative covers by Victor Kalin, Jerome Podwell, DeZuniga, Nick Cardy, Kaluta, Sparling and Luis Dominguez, this long-overlooked and welcomingly eclectic title is well overdue for a critical reappraisal, and fans of brilliant comics art and wry, laconic, cleverly humour-laced mild horror masterpieces should seek out this monochrome monolith of mirth and mystery.

Trust me: you’ll love it…
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