Category: Horror Stories

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Superman & Batman vs. Vampires & Werewolves


By Kevin VanHook & Tom Mandrake (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-2292-5

The Man of Steel and the Dark Knight are two characters who have, for the most part, escaped their lowly comic-book origins and entered the greater meta-fictional literary landscape populated by the likes of Mickey Mouse, Fu Manchu, Tarzan and  Sherlock Holmes. As such their recognition factor outside our industry means that they get to work in places and with other properties that might not appeal to funny-book purists – take for example this controversial tale that piles on heaped helpings of monster-bashing, and which, despite a host of DC guest-stars, feels more like a test launch than a guaranteed hit.

Superman & Batman vs. Vampires & Werewolves is an intriguing, if flawed, oddment (with one of the clunkiest titles ever imagined) that might appeal to the casual graphic novel reader, especially if they’re not too adamantly wedded to the comic-book roots and continuity of the DC Universe.

Prowling the streets of Gotham, Batman comes across a partially devoured corpse and is promptly boots-deep in an invasion of mindless berserker vampires and werewolves who swiftly turn the city into a charnel house. Helpless to combat or contain the undead rampage, the Caped Crusader accepts the aid of enigmatic (but rational) vampire Marius Dimeter and his lycanthropic counterpart Janko who grudgingly ally themselves with the hero to track down Herbert Combs, a truly deranged scientist resolved to traffic with the Realms Beyond.

To facilitate his goals Combs had turned Janko and Dimeter into the cursed creatures they are and unleashed his plague of horrors on America to further his research. He is infecting more helpless humans and has become an actual portal for Lovecraftian beasts to invade our reality…

Superman joins the fray as one of these Elder God nightmares is unleashed but even after its defeat is no real help: hampered more by his ethical nature than his utter vulnerability to magic. Far greater aid is provided by super-naturalist Jason Blood and his Demonic alter-ego, whilst Kirk Langstrom, who can deliberately transform into the monstrous Man-Bat, provides both scientific and brutally efficient cleanup assistance.

Fellow heroes such as Wonder Woman, Nightwing and Green Arrow turn up and join the battle with great effect, but after their admittedly impressive cameos and participatory contributions wander off before the overarching threat is ended. Nuh-uuh! Once the team-up begins comics guys (who aren’t paid big bucks like big-name guest actors) don’t leave until the day is saved.

So it’s up to the headliners – with Dimeter and Janko – to finally restore order and normality but the cost is high both in blood and convictions… In the final outcome the heroes are – relatively – victorious but the ending is rather ambiguous and leaves the impression that the whole affair has been a pilot for a Dimeter spin-off

This is clearly a break-out publishing project, aimed at drawing in new readerships like those occasional movie tie-ins that drive professional fans crazy (see Superman & Batman vs. Aliens & Predator), and on that level the daft and inconsistent plot can be permitted if not forgiven.

VanHook more often makes films than comics and the tale is certainly most effective on the kind of action and emotional set-pieces one sees in modern film: so even if there are far too many plot holes big enough to drive a hearse through, the sensorial ride should carry most readers through. Most importantly the art of Tom Mandrake is as ever astoundingly powerful: dark brooding and fully charged for triumph and tragedy…

So whilst not perhaps for every collector, there’s still a great deal of sinful pleasure to be found here. And let’s face it: who doesn’t like monster stories or finding out “who would win if”…
© 2008, 2009 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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On the Odd Hours


By Eric Liberge translated by Joe Johnson (NBM ComicsLit/Louvre: Musée du Louvre Éditions)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-577-1

This is the first time I’ve encountered this series of translated graphic novels so this review is off the cuff and without any previous prejudice and preconception. That sounded pretty poncey and imposing but all it means is: even with all the high tech info systems in the world, occasionally something rather cool can slip by the most avid fan or collector.

In this case it’s the first two books in a patently fascinating collaboration between one of the greatest museums in the world and the, until so recently, scurrilous world of comics. So I’m diving right in with immediate reactions to the third in a series of superior translated bande dessinée courtesy of those fine fellows and folks at NBM.

These tales are produced in close collaboration with the forward-looking authorities of the Louvre, but this is no gosh-wow, “Night-at-the-Museum”, thinly-concealed catalogue of contents from a stuffy edifice of public culture. Rather, here is a startling, beautiful, gloriously compelling adult horror thriller that cleverly incorporates the history, geography, icons and artifacts of the Louvre into the plot and makes the historic building and its contents a vital character in the supernatural drama.

Amongst the history and information pieces at the back of the book is an article on the services for the deaf such as signed tours, and the hearing-impaired guides and lecturers who are part of the staff. This is done to complement the tale of Bastien, an angry young deaf man who turns up at the museum to begin an internship, but somehow becomes a Night Guard, with special responsibilities for The Odd Hours of the clock: those moments when the 200 year old museum slips the shackles of reality and the exhibits escape their bounds, coming to terrifying, chaotic life…

The art is stunning in this extremely adult tome, and the creeping obsessions of Bastien as he struggles to keep his daylight life alive whilst striving to resolve the mystery of the exhibits is both poignant and enthralling.

Why was he selected for the position? Why are the animated beauties and horrors of the museum so much more enticing that his increasingly strident and difficult girlfriend? Most importantly, how can animated artworks be so much more communicative than the flesh and blood inhabitants of his “normal” life?

On the Odd Hours is utterly engrossing and darkly lovely, and despite being the third in the series reads easily as a stand-alone tale. I’m definitely going to track down the preceding volumes and I strongly recommend that you all do likewise.

© 2008 Futuropolis/Musée du Louvre Éditions. English Edition © 2010 NBM. All rights reserved.

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Someplace Strange – An Epic Graphic Novel


By Anne Nocenti & JohnBolton (Marvel)
ISBN: 0-87135-439-X

Once upon a time Marvel led the publishing pack in the development of high quality original graphic novels: mixing creator-owned properties, licensed assets like Conan, special Marvel Universe tales and even new series launches in extravagant over-sized packages (a standard 285 x 220mm rather than the now customary 258 x 168mm) that felt and looked like more than an average comicbook no matter how good, bad or incomprehensible (a polite way of saying outside the average Marvel Zombie’s comfort zone) the contents might be.

This terrifically appetizing tale, developed under the company’s creator-owned Epic imprint, applies the psychic tensions and apprehensions of the Cold War era to Alice in Wonderland territory and features a punky heroine and two sterling young boys who all take an inadvertent side-step into a graphic and ephemeral twilight zone with some long-lasting repercussions.

James or “Spike” is a rather nervous lad, dwelling far too much on the perilous state of the world, terrified of germs and war and atom bombs whilst his little brother Edward (“Captain Zebra” to you) is far more fun-loving, but still overly-impressionable. The birds tell Edward not to worry, but Spike is always afraid and he’s very convincing…

One night scary dreams prompt them to end their night-terrors by getting the Bogeyman first. Setting out for the nearest spooky old house, the lads are prepared for the worst and find it in Joy, a foul-tempered punkette runaway crashing in the old dump. Together they explore the deserted domicile and accidentally fall into a surreal otherplace of familiar monsters and cuddly weirdness.

Although it seems a dangerous and unwelcoming land the true threat is Joy, who draws a picture of her own self-loathing which comes to horrifying life and gives frantic chase…

Combining Bolton’s hyper-real and exceedingly lush painting with Nocenti’s barbed and challenging sense of whimsy, this slight but hugely entertaining fable is a treat for those adults who sometimes wish they weren’t, and a lovely reminder of why kids like to be safely scared sometimes.
© 1988 Anne Nocenti and John Bolton. All Rights Reserved.

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The Witching Hour


By Jeph Loeb, Chris Bachalo & Art Thibert (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-251-6

I gather a new edition of this dark little treat is imminent so here’s a quick graphic novel review to whet your appetites and prime your bank accounts…

The original title the Witching Hour was a quirky, highly readable anthology comic from DC’s 1970s horror/mystery stable, with the early issues particularly memorable due to some extremely tasty contributions from arch-stylist Alex Toth. The pithy, spooky, mordantly ironic yarns were recounted by three iconic hosts representing the Wiccan concept of maiden, mother and crone and nominally based on the Weird sisters from Macbeth: namely Cynthia, Mildred and Mordred. The series ran from 1969 to 1978.

In 1999, with the company’s Vertigo imprint successfully reinventing the horror comic month by month, a number of old properties were given the proverbial fresh spin and Jeph Loeb and Chris Bachalo produced a delightfully dark, character-driven mystery yarn as a three issue prestige-format miniseries, promptly collected in a volume that unjustly vanished with nary a ripple of comment. Hopefully this time out it will garner some better press and attention…

In Manhattan, vivacious, exotic Amanda Collins visits a disparate, desperate selection of characters, daring them to trade-in their pasts and seize new futures. Dispensing blank business-cards and new realities to the lost, lonely and dangerous with but a wish, she seems the epitome of wild chance and missed opportunities, but Amanda too is a prisoner of the past, with a sorcerous heritage reaching back to 1660 and a romantic clash between Christian propriety and pagan license.

As other mysterious mystics also enfold fate-touched mortals in some enigmatic grand scheme – are they Amanda’s coven comrades or opponents in some grand game? – a centuries old debt is assessed… and perhaps repaid…

Vague as that sounds, it is all you need for this complex, intriguing, savage, seductive, sexy and addictively arcane experiment in sequential story-telling. The connections linking Amanda to her own past, her witchly companions and all the apparent innocents who accept her highly suspicious offer are deliberately obscure; thus the tale unfolds on a multitude of levels and the reader actually has to engage the brain to divine the hidden secrets of the Witching Hour.

Bachalo’s art is magic of the purely pictorial kind: as light and airy as clouds and deeply, densely, information-packed like a favourite grimoire. The section collecting his design sketches are sleek and pretty, everything an art-lover could want to see.

This is a book that washes over you like a wave, all mood and moment, and will offer a rare challenge for adult readers tired of being spoon-fed their fiction-fix.

© 1999, 2000 Jeph Loeb and Chris Bachalo. All rights reserved.

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Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter: First Death


By Laurell K. Hamilton, Jonathon Green & Wellington Alves (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-07851-3476-3

I’m not a great fan of these oh-so-topical vampire love-stories – and to be fair the first entries in the vast sequence of supernatural thrillers by Laurell K. Hamilton either didn’t start out as a prototypical example of that blossoming sub-genre or the author displayed extraordinary patience before getting to the sanguinary snogging – preferring instead to concentrate on blending horror and police procedural elements rather than delve into the somewhat dubious but unaccountably popular teen passion for getting jiggy with dead people.

Therefore this review will concentrate specifically on the material created for this graphic novel prequel, set in the early days of the necromantic private detective and re-animator…

Sharing elements with such later but rather better-known properties as Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries (as seen on TV as True Blood) and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files (see The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle) the stories are set in modern day St. Louis on an Earth where magic is real and the supernatural is both accepted and legitimised.

Here America is at the forefront of civil rights for supernaturals, granting spooks and fiends the same rights and protections every other citizen has under the Constitution. Since the rest of the world is somewhat less enlightened about the things that prey on humanity the USA has experienced a huge influx of migrant monsters, and society – particularly law-enforcement – has had to adapt quickly.

Anita Blake is a necromancer whose day job is to temporarily raise the dead (for settling will litigation and the like…) but she also works with the police, using her powers to execute vampires who break the law. That law being: don’t kill humans – or else…

The first novel Guilty Pleasures was adapted by Marvel as miniseries with great success but appalling frequency, and an all-original 2 issue micro-series prequel, ‘The First Death’ was rushed out to supplement the saga and placate the waiting fans. Together with the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Guilty Pleasures Handbook that tale is collected here to reveal the early days of many of the novel’s characters and locations.

The Handbook is an illustrated text glossary of all you need to know about Blake’s world compiled and written by Stuart Vandal, Ronald Byrd, Michael Hoskin, Chris Biggs & Ave Cullen illustrated by Brett Booth and Ron Lim, but be warned it does reveal the end of Guilty Pleasures so either read that first or accept that you know in advance who dies, stays undead, gets staked etc…

‘First Death’ is a rather appetising, readable treat – although Brett Booth’s art, whilst highly competent, feels fearfully dated due to its angular, Image-style rendering…

When butchered, blood-drained children begin turning up, it’s clearly a case of a vampire gone off the rails and Sergeant Dolph Storr calls in Anita Blake, a licensed Vamp executioner to kill the freak when they eventually catch it.

She surprises the jaded cops by actively joining their hunt. Only state-sanctioned operatives like Blake are allowed to expedite the undead, but usually they wait until cops have done all the dirty work of finding and catching the blood-suckers…

The investigation leads to the Vampire enclave of “The District” where supernatural businesses and citizens cluster in a quasi-legal, twilight zone ghetto and inevitably to “Guilty Pleasures”; a bar and strip club where the quick and the dead mingle in secure anonymity. For the first time Anita meets the proprietor Jean-Claude, a powerful Nosferatu who will figure prominently in her future…

By seeking the kid-killer the hard-pressed hunters accidentally uncover a huge ring of rogue vampires who have been covertly slaughtering citizens, and when the Executioner and her mentor Manny get in over their heads child-killer Valentine (a later arch-enemy for Blake) nearly butchers them both. Luckily they have a heavy-hitter of their own…

Edward is only human and used to be a hitman, but as that proved to be no challenge, now he only takes on vampire commissions. He’s the one thing the supernaturals are scared of…

Fast-paced and extremely intense, this is a riotous horror-ride-come-cop-story for older readers and one that has enough wit and wonderment to engage even an old curmudgeon like me. If you thought this was a chick-lit chiller that has nothing to offer dedicated comics veterans, think again…

© 200, 2009 Laurell K. Hamilton. All rights reserved

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Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone: Walking Distance


Adapted by Mark Kneece & Dove McHargue (Bloomsbury)
ISBN: 978-0-7475-8787-3

The Twilight Zone was an anthology television show created by the incredibly talented Rod Serling which ran for five seasons between 1959 and 1964. It served to introduce real science fiction, fantasy and modern horror themes to adult audiences who had thus far only experienced escapist, gung-ho space operas such as Flash Gordon and Tom Corbett: Space Cadet.

Serling’s show and the rivals and spin-offs which followed such as The Outer Limits and Night Gallery proved that such themes had both literary value and commercial potential during the turbulent “Space Age” of the 1960’s, and Twilight Zone in particular, thanks to Serling’s progressive views even addressed many social evils of the day.

There were 156 episodes of the first series – over half written by Serling – with such luminaries as Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Reginald Rose, Charles Beaumont, Earl Hamner Jr., Ray Bradbury, Damon Knight, Harlan Ellison, Lewis Padgett, Jerome Bixby and even Ambrose Bierce, also contributing episodes or tales for adaptation. It was revived twice (in 1985-1989 and 2002; a further 109 episodes) and the various incarnations ran continually in syndication from 1959-2003). Without the Twilight Zone and Rod Serling, it’s doubtful that shows like Star Trek would ever have been made…

Now Mark Kneece (see the superb Trailers, which he produced with Julie Collins-Rousseau), in conjunction with the Savannah College of Art and Design, has adapted some of those landmark early episodes as graphic novels published by Walker Books for Young Readers in America and available in the UK through Bloomsbury.

Martin Sloan is driving his expensive car. A 39 year-old ad exec at the top of his game, he is rich, busy and slowly dying inside. When his car crashes he finds himself near an old fashioned small-town just like the one he grew up in. Exactly like it. In fact, there’s a young boy over yonder who looks the spitting image of…

Illustrated with understated efficiency by Dove McHargue, a tutor at the Savannah college, ‘Walking Distance’ is a melancholic assault on the Rat-Race of Sixties America, an elegy to simpler, happier times and Serling’s most personal – almost autobiographical – story. This is a powerful shot at the relentless American Dream of success at all costs, with just the right amount of tension and terror to spice up the fable whilst keeping the message poignant and welcoming.

As Sloan confronts his past and reshapes his future, in this wonderfully enticing tale it’s easy to see and painful to admit that even though the warnings were clear fifty years ago (the episode was the fifth to air, a Halloween treat which debuted on October 30th 1959) the lesson still needs learning today.

Serling was a comics fan from his earliest days, particularly of the EC tales that shook America in the days before the Comics Code: a fact obvious to anybody who has read those challenging masterpieces and watched his magnificent continuation of them in television. This adaptation of his work is both a fitting tribute and an excellent introduction to a world of graphic narrative a little further out and deeper in than the costumed mainstream, and one any older child can – and should – happily experience.

Text © 2008 the Rod Serling Trust. Illustrations © 2008 by Design Press, a division of Savannah College of Art and Design, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Sand & Fury – a Scream Queen Adventure


By Ho Che Anderson (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-321-7

After the groundbreaking graphic journalism of his examination of Martin Luther King (see King – a Comic Biography: the Special Edition) Ho Che Anderson has turned his talents to pure fiction in a startling and visceral re-interpretation of the legend of the banshee (or Bien Sidhe) transplanted to the cold nights and inhospitable deserts of the American west.

Against a backdrop of a serial killer stalking the area a stranded young woman is picked up by a striking woman in a fancy car. Despite her misgivings the girl soon warms to her rescuer, sharing her life and dreams. She has no idea that her life will soon end.

Whilst seeking answers to her own obscured past the driver instinctively knows she is an Angel of Death drawn to the side of people soon to die. Is she a cursed witness or somehow the facilitator? As she discovers some truths in rapid, slashes of flashbacks and jumps forward she zeroes in on the killer: someone she knew intimately.

However, when she meets another of her kind the secrets revealed only lead to a greater mystery; one infinite in scope and terrifyingly ancient in execution…

Citing Dario Argento, David Lynch, Richard Sala and Charles Burns as inspiration and with hints and overtones of Trashy Road Movies, Celtic mythology, the cosmology of H.P. Lovecraft and the modern bogeyman of Serial Killers this is a scary, sexy, gory story that heeds your full attention but delivers a devastating punch. Anderson is as much designer as illustrator and both his art and his stories are stark, powerfully arresting, even challenging concoctions.

The art, jagged black and white with judicious doses of red, isn’t prettied up and the narrative isn’t spoon fed. The reader will have to work to glean the meaning here, but the end result is more than worth the effort.

Sand & Fury © 2010 Fantagraphics Books. All content © 2010 Ho Che Anderson. All rights reserved.

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Sandkings – A DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel


By George R. R. Martin, adapted by Doug Moench, Pat Broderick & Neal McPheeters (DC Comics)
ISBN: 0-930289-20-X

During the 1980s DC, on a creative roll like many publishers large and small, attempted to free comics narrative from its previous constraints of size and format as well as content. To this end, legendary editor Julie Schwartz called upon contacts from his early days as a Literary Agent to convince major names from the prose fantasy genre to allow their early classics to be adapted into a line of Science Fiction Graphic Novels.

This macabre and compelling novelette by George R.R. Martin was first published in the August 1979 issue of Omni Magazine and has won a bunch of literary glittering prizes including the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Poll Awards.

In 1995 it was rather harshly re-imagined as the debut episode of the relaunched TV anthology series The Outer Limits, premiering on 26 March: a terrifying parable of cruelty and obsession. Good as it was, this version pales into insignificance when compared to the prose original’s tone and setting, which adaptors Doug Moench, artist Pat Broderick, painter/colourist Neal McPheeters and lettering mastermind Todd Klein have scrupulously adhered to here.

As always, any adaptation – no matter how well executed – is absolutely no substiture for experiencing an artist’s work the way it was originally intended. So Go Read The Story. It’s one of the most reprinted and collected short stories of the last thirty years. However, as this is a place to review graphic novels, let’s proceed on the assumption that you already have or will…

The often inconsistent Broderick was on top form for this chilling cautionary tale of pride and human vice, perfectly augmented by the subtle tones of McPheeters whilst Moench’s idiosyncratic writing style is perfectly harnessed to catalogue the descent of Simon Kress, playboy, businessman, collector of alien animals and the planet Baldur’s most affluent closet sadist.

Kress is fascinated by animals. Not the cute, cuddly, unconditional love sort, but rather the kinds that rip and claw and eat each other. Returning from a trip he finds that his Earth Piranha had done just that, and his carrion hawk was gone too. Only his Shambler was still alive. His biggest regret was that he had missed all the action.

Bored and finding nothing interesting at his usual xeno-fauna outlets, he stumbles upon the strange emporium of traders Wo and Shade, and discovers the bizarre hive-mind arthropods dubbed Sandkings. Like ant colonies these creatures build homes and make war upon each other in a perpetual dance of resource redistribution. Their glass tank housed four queens or “Maws” who will produce colour-coded warriors to fight and drones to build beautiful hive-castles. To better produce new “citizens” the Maws can and will eat anything …

The creatures also possess a rudimentary telepathy, enough to assess the power of their owner, and reshape their environment to reflect and venerate his appearance. Relentless, creative killers that will worship him… how could any arrogant sociopath resist?

Soon the creatures are the toast of the playboy’s dissolute cronies. Parties where Kress’ debauched friends pit their pets against the Sandkings become legendary, and nothing can stand up to them: not Shamblers, Silver Snakes, Sand Spiders… No organic creature can survive long once it encroaches on their territory, since when not battling each other the creatures join forces to destroy any intruder. As the colonies increase in size, so necessarily does their tank. …

When Jala Wo checks up on her sale she finds most of the Sandkings thriving but one faction lags behind in castle-building. The Black, Red and White armies are healthy and vigorous, their eerie citadels displaying Kress’s face over and over again but the Orange bugs are suffering decline. Kress has been starving the creatures and wrecking their constructions to make them fight harder…

As the playboy sinks further into cruel depravity, his sickened girlfriend protests, even setting the planetary authorities on him. Judicious bribery easily solves that problem whilst the Sandkings themselves prove the perfect way to dispose of her. Unfortunately during her murder the tank breaks and the creatures all escape into the confines of his house and estate.

Panicked now, Kress goes on a bloody rampage, clearing up all the details (and witnesses) that could implicate him in murder and illegal xeno-form trafficking, but the damage is done. The Sandkings are loose, having staked new territory. Moreover they have declared war on the god who treated them so harshly… And that’s where the story really begins.

This chilling adaptation is comfortably traditional in its delivery, fully allowing the story to shine, and is a perfect companion to DC’s other adaptations. It a huge pity they’re all currently out of print. This is an experiment the company should seriously consider resuming and I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: all these previously published DC Science Fiction Graphic Novels would make an irresistible “Absolute” compilation…
Sandkings © 1979 Omni International, Inc.  © 1981 George R. R. Martin.  Illustrations © 1986 DC Comics Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

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Yragael: Urm


By Philippe Druillet (Dragon’s Dream)
ISBN: 9-063-325210

The fantasy tales of Lone Sloane revolutionised graphic fiction not only in Europe but especially in Britain and America when the baroque and bizarre cosmic odysseys began appearing in the adult fantasy magazine Heavy Metal, which combined original material with the best that “Old World” comics had to offer. By the time French comics collective Les Humanoides Associes launched the groundbreaking magazine Métal Hurlant in 1975, Philippe Druillet, one of their visual and philosophical big guns, had been creating new myths for nearly a decade…

Born in Toulouse in 1944, Druillet was born and raised in Spain, a photographer and artist who started his comics career in 1966 with an apocalyptic science fiction epic Le Mystère des abîmes (The Mystery of the Abyss) which introduced the doom-tainted Earthling, intergalactic freebooter and wanderer called Lone Sloane in a far distant future: a tale heavily influenced by HP Lovecraft and A.E. Van Vogt. Later influences included Michael Moorcock’s doomed anti-hero Elric (and I’m pretty sure I can see some Jack Kirby and Barry Windsor-Smith also tinting the mix…)

He began working for Pilote in 1969, and revived his mercurial star-rover for a number of short pieces which were first gathered together as a graphic novel in 1972. Prior to the large scale (310mm x 233mm) 1991 collection from NBM (see The Six Voyages of Lone Sloane and the later compilation Lone Sloane: Delirius).

Following these early epics he further stretched himself with the astounding, nihilistic, “End of Days” cosmic tragedies of the doomed prince Yragael and his child of ill fortune Urm.

Readers of Moorcock, August Derleth and particularly Jack Vance will recognise shared themes in the woeful tale of the last times of Earth where declining humanity is beset by gods and demons keen on recovering their lost power, on a blasted planet where men still intrigue and kill each other for gain. From this guttering chaos arises Yragael, a potential messiah who founders and falls due to pride and a ghastly liaison with the dire Nereis, witch queen of the living city Spharain…

One hundred years later in the devastated wastelands of the world, the grotesque hunchbacked spawn of that illicit union falls under the spell of mendacious demons and attempts to reclaim both parts of his heritage. Urm is stupid but passionate and his cataclysmic visit to the horrendous city reveals that the Last Men are just as much playthings of the gods as the monstrous bastard himself…

This is a graphic odyssey of utterly Byzantine narrative and Brobdignagian, baroque scale and scope. The storytelling is reduced to the merest plot, as the text (more pictorial accoutrement than dialogue facilitator) and art goes into emotional overdrive. This isn’t a tale told, it’s a mesmerising, breathless act of graphic expression. If it helps think of it as ballet or a symphony rather than a novel or play: you’re supposed to go “wow!” not “a-ha!”

The visual syntax and techniques originated in these non-stories dictated the shape of science fiction – especially in movies – for decades. Character and plot are again pared to pure fundamentals so that Druillet could fully unleash the startling graphic innovations in design and layout that churned within him, and which exploded from his pen and brain.

His brand of universal Armageddon achieved levels of graphic energy that only Jack Kirby has ever equalled, and this is another work crying out for re-release in large format with all the bells and whistles modern technology can provide, but until that distant tomorrow this book will have to do – and do very well.

Luckily for you it’s still widely available and remarkably inexpensive…
© 1974 Philippe Druillet/Dargaud Editeur. © 1975 Philippe Druillet/Dargaud Editeur. All rights reserved.

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Vamps


By Elaine Lee and Will Simpson (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-220-2

As a long overdue antidote to the deluge of lovey-dovey, kissey-poo tales of forbidden love between innocent modern maids and moody, tragic carriers of the Curse of the Night’s Children, here’s a reminder of a different sort of Vampire Tale – one that is sleazy, nasty and very, very scary…

Vampires are heartless, bloodsucking raptors that wander the night, slaughtering whomever they wish. In this story set in the Badlands of modern America, they’re still generally regarded as creatures of myth, but apart from not turning into bats all the usual movie lore applies: fast, strong, non-reflective, scared of stakes and sunlight. The big new wrinkle is that blood gets them crazy-dumb drunk…

Our epic ride follows the liberating run of five hungry, hot and horny undead bad-girls called Screech, Whipsnake, Skeeter, Mink and Howler who begin their longed-for emancipation by finally killing Dave, the male Vamp who “turned” them all, then lorded it over them like a fat and lazy lion in a savannah Pride. After staking and dismembering him the girls go on a wild spree across the States, riding Harley’s down Hell’s highways, killing bikers and ne’er-do-wells (and the odd innocent bystander) wherever they find them.

They’re completely unaware that one of them has been manipulating her sisters all along and orchestrating the seemingly random slaughter. As a private detective and Howler’s psychic – and still breathing – sister Jenny tracks them, the pack hits Las Vegas and we discover that when she was alive Howler was a stripper whose baby was taken from her by a corrupt judge and sold in a black market adoption deal. Dave’s destruction, the road-rage, everything has been a plan to get her baby back.

All the pieces and pursuers are headed for a bloody crash and climax when Howler finally locates her son, but there’s an unwelcome complication: Dave has pulled himself together and is really, really annoyed…

Far more True Blood than Twilight (and predating both by more than a decade) this fast-paced, sardonic and gorily wild ride of love and death is a spectacular and absorbing riot by two of the industry’s best and most unsung talents: sordid, sexy and totally compelling, riddled with far deeper metaphors than “unrequited love sucks”, Vamps is a solid reminder that there are such things as monsters and some beasts just won’t be tamed…
© 1994, 1995 DC Comics.  All Rights Reserved.