Archive for the ‘Horror Comics News’ Category

The Walking Dead is a long running horror comic series. Image Comics has recently released a $1.00 special issue to entice new readers to the story. It’s called Image Firsts The Walking Dead. It worked. I’m enticed.

Often I only have a cover in the post but I wanted you to see some of the innards of this one. It is black and white, and fairly “comicy” styled, but the pacing and flow of the images rivals anything I’ve seen in the “new” Creepy. Plus it has ZOMBIES! (YAY!)

I am not a big fan of people ripping off the cliched “standards”, such as zombies and vampires, simply because they are selling. I consider it to be a whore-like and lazy substitute for creativity. It took all my strength not to bitch about the vampire comic I just wrote about yesterday.

Vampires have been done to death. (hee hee)

And the saddest part is that vampires have now been mutated from cold, ancient, horrid, life-sucking, degenerate unearthly abominations, to young cool nifty wonderful things that girls want to have as boyfriends. And what annoys me most is instead of them bursting into flames and dying horribly in the sun, they “sparkle”. Blecch!

Ok, so zombies are cliche. But if you’re going to do them, do them right.  Look at that inside shot. That is a great illustration. And anyone who can get away with WHUMP! and OOF!, both with exclamation points and both in the SAME PANEL certainly deserves my money.  The guys who wrote and drew this thing definitely did it right. (That would be Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, by the way.)

I would love for you to buy the dollar special, but it’s kinda’ sold out.  My link points to a page that has the TP collections on it (at a discount of course). And back ordering the $1.00 one (for $.80) is possible. Or you could wait till it becomes in stock again.

You could also wait till I get one of the collections then review it. That may take a while but I will get around to it eventually.

That’s all for today, now I have to get back down to the cellar before my thing rips its chains out of the floor…

again.

PS-Whump!  Oof!   …I love it

Hellboy in Mexico is the latest issue of some incarnation of the Hellboy comic book series. In today’s post I will be telling you what I think about it and where to get it cheap.

Hello and welcome to Monday. I usually never mention the day in the post. This is because I  write these posts, one day and edit them a different day and by the time they get up on the blog it might be several weeks. But today, in light of my new shorter, more frequent posting policy and the fact that I’m putting all my time into the newsletter instead of the blog, I can crank this thing out and post it in a short time.

I have never read Hellboy. I didn’t see the first movie. And I have yet to see the second movie. I want to see it, but haven’t.  So I came to this comic, knowing nothing about this character. Not counting the few details that I may have gleaned by watching the trailers for the movies.

So why, you may ask, did I suddenly haul-off and buy a Hellboy comic? Especially one as bizarre and specialized as Hellboy in Mexico (which by the way is subtitled “or, a drunken blur“).?

I have only one excuse. One of the credits on the cover is Richard Corben. As many of you may know, I am an ancient fan of Richard Corben.

I first discovered Corben’s work in the pages of the now defunct Eerie and/or Creepy published in the 70’s by Warren Publishing. (yes this is the Creepy Dark Horse’s new publication is supposed to be a resurrection of, or remake, or continuation, or whatever you call it when they re-do a comic) So, when I was in my early teens, Corben comprised half of my favorite artists. The other half being Bernie Wrightson.

Interesting story here. I didn’t know that one of my favorite artists was Bernie until much later.  I remembered seeing Corben stuff here and there and his name in the magazines Creepy/Eerie. It wasn’t until more recently, when I decided to revisit them that I realized the art that I really loved the most was Bernie Wrightson. (okay, maybe it’s not that interesting).

Other people may remember Richard Corbin as the creator and artist responsible for Den, a long running storyline in the old  Heavy Metal magazine. It even made it into the Heavy Metal Movie as one of the animated stories.  He was very prolific in Heavy Metal magazine, back when it was still good. ( Again the 70s and 80s.) (Interesting note…Bernie Wrightson’s work also made it into that same movie. ) Richard Corben painted the cover art for the Meatloaf album Bat Out of Hell . (And not too surprisingly, he was  enlisted to paint the cover for Bat Out of Hell II.)

But I digress…

The point to all this is I’ve read the comic. I have no idea how the story compares to other Hellboy stories. But the art is very nice, of course. It has humor, and I will be keeping an eye out for other Hellboy titles. In the meantime, I would certainly suggest you buy it or if you know someone that has it, steal it from them.

As is my new policy, you can get to a place to buy these comics by clicking on any mention of comics in my posts.  Oh!  If you buy through the vendor  I link to, you get a discount off the cover price of these things.  For example, I got my copy from the local comic shop.  I paid $3.50 plus tax.  But through my links you’re connected to a vendor from whom you can buy these things for 20% off. Which makes this $2.80.  There is also a variant cover which lists for $5.00, but you can get it for $4.00 through my link.

That’s it for today, come back soon for the next exciting installment, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to be talking about.  I’ll probably just pick something at random out of a pile I have laying here.

What should have been a week, became almost a month. Yes, kiddies, it was last month that I made the commitment to review each and every story in Dark Horse’s Creepy issue #1. I had two reasons for doing this.

The first was my mistaken belief that it would help me get used to writing everyday. It didn’t.

The second, was the need to really bitch out loud about a couple of the stories in the magazine. I wanted people to see that I could do more than just bitch. I hoped that writing reviews of the good stories would balance it out. That didn’t work either.

Free at Last…

The issue is over. Save this last couple sentences I never need to write about it ever again. Let’s get the last review out of the way quickly, shall we?

The last story in this new horror anthology was a reprint. It was called Daddy And The Pie. It may have been cool in the fifties or whenever it was originally carved on a cave wall, but in 2009 it just doesn’t cut it. Written by Who Cares, and illustrated by I. Dongiv Ashit.

I originally thought the story was one of the better ones in the rag. But that has changed. It was not a horror story. It was not new. It should not have been there.

When Creepy Did Not Suck…

The real Creepy magazine (Creepy TOS) had twice the number of pages as the new one does. If they are going to keep the page count so damned low, they don’t have room for reprints.

Many have said that it’s so wonderful that there are no ads in it. I disagree. Add about 20 pages even if they are all ads. The magazine will be better. I like seeing other things of interest. I think of ads as a service to me, not an imposition. (unless they’re Join-the-Fuckin-Army ads.) But if they are ads for things that I would like and otherwise would not know about, bring them on! I have no clue how often the best thing in some of the comics I have read has been the ads, but it’s pretty often that’s for sure.

Now that I have gotten this unnecessary challenge out of the way I get to write about things that are actually good. I recently got 2 new comics that are very good indeed. One of them is House Of Mystery and the other is Darkness: Pitt.

Come back soon kiddies and you will hear about good horror, and see way better images.

Oh, and the next issue of Creepy comes out in October (Joy). Let’s hope these guys have read my posts and improved the mag. I will buy it of course, because it’s my damned job. But if this one doesn’t show a marked improvement over the last one, I will not be as nice about the whole thing as I have been.

I need a shower.

Welcome back kiddies. Can you remember all the way back to the second or third article in this series, where I told you that when I got to the second last story. You have to remind me about something? Well this is it. This is the second last story. It’s also my second last article. The Horse at this point has been reduced almost to the point of a puddle. But I do have to get the last couple whacks in.

Then, I can finally get on to some more very interesting comic books that I found recently. The story I’m talking about today, is titled Loathsome Lore “Faustian deals”. It basically is a rambling narrative, which speculates about certain celebrities having been in league with the devil.

It’s interesting comic books stuff. The story is credited as “Haufner, Braun, and Gore. And the art is by Hilary Barta. As I said in a previous article, much of the writing in this particular piece seems to have been lifted from a 1974 issue of Hustler magazine. (That was the one in which they had the article, about Anton Szandor LaVey).

Now I have to complain about an editorial decision made in the magazine. As I said before, I had never heard of Robert Johnson before the story Hell Hound Blues. I naturally thought it was just made up for the story. That story was the second story in the magazine, Faustian deals was the second last. But in it it referenced the deal that Robert Johnson made with the devil.

I believe these two stories should have been switched in position, for two reasons. The first is that it would’ve allowed Loathsome Lore to introduce the concept of Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil before it was used in a story.

The second and possibly more important reason to switch these two stories is that Hell Hound Blues is the best story in the magazine. It should have been second last. Well, actually, it should’ve been last. But second last still would’ve been better.

As for the writing of this particular tale. It seems interesting enough. It is not however a story. I like it. But it really is not a story. The artwork is its saving grace and is unquestionably the best artwork in the entire magazine (not including the frontispiece by Bernie Wrightson).

Hallelujah! Although I’m not quite finished with this horse, yet. I feel are renewed vigor. I’m into the home stretch. There is only one more story to talk about and that one’s going to be pretty easy, because it’s a reprint. Yes kiddies, they didn’t even bother closing with something new.

The tale in question, Daddy And The Pie will have to wait for the next post. Only then will I be able to inflict the final whack.

Be careful driving home, and remember – time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

I am still doing the ongoing review of Dark Horse’s Creepy issue #1. This is day 5. Today I will be talking about All The Help You need. It is one of the good stories so I don’t need to say much about it.

You may be wondering about the image accompanying this post. It is from the story under discussion. But it is not colored in the magazine. In looking over my last few posts I noticed that all the images have been gray scale. That’s what the book is. But on the blog it gets monotonous (snicker). So I figured screw it, and colored the picture myself. Further down the post you can see a different example that I left alone.

The author of this story is Neil Kleid. He has won awards for being awesome. And in this story he did not disappoint. It’s a great story. He’s a good writer, and if you look him up on Google you can find a lot of his earlier works. I will be seeking more of his stuff.

The other guy is obviously a good illustrator, which you can tell just by looking at this story, but what a lot of people don’t know is that he did not originally start out to be an artist.

Just after the war…

Brian was born in 1953 just after the United States lifted the ban on selling rubber. This was fortunate for his family, because his father had been a freelance rubber salesman before the war.  Since the United States entry into WWII his dad was forced into alternative lines of work such as going door to door and begging for dust. Also, after spending his last money on a mail-order trade school, his father tried his hand at fish grooming, but was unable to get the necessary equipment because of all the fish clippers being sent to troops fighting in the south Pacific.

By the time Brian was 6, his father was back on top of the rubber game. With his father often gone for weeks on end and his mother too drunk to stop him, Brian took a great interest in tap dancing and the making of unusual noises using only his hands.

He graduated from the East Albert High School with a full tap-dancing scholarship. He then attended New Smithville University where he found himself unable to keep up with the demands of college English.

Although a brilliant tap-dancer, he lost is scholarship his second year due to the English Professor being an “asswipe”. In later interviews Brian referred to that Professor as “the cocksucker [who] had it in for me”.

Dazed, and still a little hung-over, he was wandering from door to door trying to find his girlfriend’s apartment when he noticed a circus recruitment poster in the local drugstore window.

The following morning he enlisted in Barnum & Bailey’s and became Willy the Tap-Dancing Clown.

Unfortunately for Willy, tap shoes don’t work on sawdust. After an agonizing three weeks of stomping almost to the point of exhaustion, just to try to make a sound, he was forced to juggle.

Again his natural talents came to his aid. Although two dead weasels in a burning wet sack could juggle better then he, the strange noises emanating from his hands whenever he managed to actually catch a ball made him a crowd favorite. After only 8 short months on the road he was promoted to King of the Circus and given a hand wash and wax, as was the custom.

By the late 60s the lesser circuses had all but shut down and even his was feeling the pinch from lack of public interest. Then if the failing circus wasn’t enough, he got caught up in an elephant molestation scandal.

A woman that he had fired several months earlier, accused him publicly of fondling the elephants. He denied the allegations, but by the time he was cleared of all charges the circus was unrecoverable.

He hanged himself in his own studio a year later.

His younger brother, Ned, found him still alive. He cut him down and called an ambulance. The doctor on call said that had Ned arrived a few days later, or had Brian hanged himself by the neck, rather than the nut-sack, he would have died.

Brian was placed into an asylum after that, where he remains to this day.

Wait…

That was Brian Chinchilla. The guy who drew this was Brian Churilla. Nevermind.

Point is I don’t need to write anything about this story. It’s great and both the people involved are very talented guys.

Look at the artwork, then go buy the book. I have two more stories to review and they are both good.

Tune in tomorrow kids for Loathsome Lore: Faustian Deals.

Is that brimstone I smell?

No.

I had eggs and beer last night.