Archive for the ‘Horror Comics News’ Category

Dark Horse’s Creepy, issue number three sports the slogan “48 page is of demonic dread”.  So it seems pretty obvious that they’re going to keep getting creative on the subtitle on every issue.  It’s just a pity they don’t Read the rest of this entry »

When The Walking Dead premiered, my daughter sat riveted. An excruciatingly long first episode held her in rapt attention for one and a half hours. Ok it was actually only 1 hour when you skipped the commercials; She has Tivo. But it was, to her, entertaining. I overheard her talking to her friends on the phone and telling them how wonderful it was. I thought, this thing must be pretty good. I needed to see it right away and blog about it.

You may notice that this blog post is dated after the last episode has aired, because it took me this long to trudge through enough of the show to be able to write about it.

In short, it BLEW!

There was no reason for this to be the case. It was based on an amazing series of graphic novels that  where fast-paced, well written and unpredictable. Main characters would die without warning. At the point where lesser authors would just have gotten their characters set-up and ready to act, they where already finished and dead. This thing moved. It crackled with snappy writing and originality.

If you are the lucky bastard who gets to transform an already wonderful work into a new medium, why would you mutilate the hell out of it? Changing things because they  won’t translate well from printed to video form is understandable and necessary. But changing things just to change things is asshole-ish. If you want something different then why not just write something original? Oh wait! I know why… Because your writers suck!

It’s a good sign that all the writers were fired right after the last episode, but sad that they needed to be. The show, as written, may never be able to live up to the potential it had from it’s source material (unless the first show of the second season begins with the main character waking up in the hospital and we start over.).

I wish this show had been better. But for those of you who think it’s good, feel free to enjoy it.  If you have never seen these movie cliches before, then they’re new to you. But if you thought it started rambling a bit, and maybe were wondering why the last episode seemed so freakin’ random, it’s because it was. They’d ignored and changed so many plot points that they had no clue where to go, but needed to do a cliffhanger anyway. It’s sad.

If you can’t wait to see more, or if you just want to see something better read The Walking Dead graphic novel compilations.

For more fun, watch this…

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