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chuckroI bought this bundle a year ago, and it also suffered from the “they gave me enormous pdfs that wouldn’t open on my ReMarkable until I compressed them” problem.
I read Girls (volumes 1-4) last year; it’s about a mysterious naked woman who appears in a small town just as it’s sealed off from the outside world by a forcefield. She has sex with a local man, lays a bunch of eggs that hatch into clones of her, and they start terrorizing the town. The sexual politics are, as you might imagine, a goddamn mess. You can tell this was written by men who were trying, but failing, to make their female characters act like humans but could only manage TV characters. (Which I think was my criticism the last time I read something by the Luna brothers, too!)
Dracula Motherf**ker - Dracula is revived in 1974 and immediately sets out to make more brides; and freelance photographer Quincy Harker gets caught in the middle of things. The portrayal of Dracula is interesting—physically, he’s an inhuman swarm of shadows, but his personality is “abusive Hollywood producer.” And to spoil the twist: The vampire hunters that come after him are his previous brides, who realized he was just using them and came to stop him from doing it to others.
Milkman Murders – Half of this book is meeting a dreary family of terrible people living a shitty suburban life. The other half is watching the mother go nuts and murder them all, and the milkman too. I think this is trying to say something pretentious about suburban life or underlying rage, but any meaning gets lost in the gratuitousness of it.
Coyotes (volume 1) – In the City of Lost Girls, it’s not safe for women to go out at night, because there are packs of coyotes who will tear them apart. But Red and One-Eye have taught themselves to use ninja weapons to fight back. This starts out as a “take back the night” metaphor but quickly turns into a fantasy inspired by the World of Darkness rpg line, as the girls join an order of female hunters and the coyotes turn out to be criminals wearing the shaved pelts of an ancient werewolf that’s being experimented on by a big corporation. (Seriously, this is somebody’s campaign about Pentex making Skin-Dancers and the new recruits for the Hunters having to stop them, with the serial numbers filed off.) The second volume was also in the bundle, but I didn’t bother.
Dark Fang (volume 1) – This is power fantasy wish-fulfillment starring a vampire ecoterrorist and I am HERE for it. She was turned a century ago, killed her sire, and lived happily underwater until an oil spill disrupted her life. Now she’s making the foolish mortals of the modern world obey her whims and killing oil executives and politicians. When she goes too far, the US government and a secret church organization conspire to have her killed...but their victory will be short-lived. This is absurdly over-the-top and it really worked for me.
The Discipline (volume 1) - By Peter Milligan, who did Shade the Changing Man and a lot of other Vertigo weirdness, and it shows. A woman is seduced into an ancient secret society of shapeshifters who fight a mysterious group of immortal body-hoppers. And there’s lots of sex and BDSM, but that’s not what it’s about, you see; it’s about the weirdness and possibly about feeling disconnected from the world and that holding supernatural meaning. (A theme Milligan has used in other works, too.) This is “volume 1”, but the main story ends—with lots of greater mysteries, of course—and no other issues seem to have ever been produced. We’ll never know if the lords of The Discipline were lying about the past or what’s going to happen to Melissa’s sister or if Orlando is really dead. Ah, well.
Nomen Omen (volume 1) - This has the “I want to grow up to be Grant Morrison” problem, piling a lot of not-actually-exposition mysteries into some very jumpy sequences that don’t actually start pretending to make sense until halfway through the volume. Once you figure out who the protagonist is and what’s actually going on (a witch-girl mixed up in the affairs of fairies; fairy politics have apparently been messed up since their princess died on 9/11) it’s…not better. I mean, the art is lovely (they make very clever use of color to represent the main character’s magic-vision) and there are lots of queer characters, and it’s trying to be clever, but it just doesn’t work for me. (There were more volumes in the bundle; I’m skipping them.)
Cold Spots - A pretty standard horror movie done as a comic miniseries: A man is hired to find a missing woman and her child (spoiler: he’s the estranged father of the kid) and traces her to a town full of ghosts that freeze everything they touch. Turns out that the kid has ghost-commending powers, and the nearby cultists want to use her to bring back their ghost/demon leader guy. Spooky child, evil ghosts, the hero survives because the plot says so, all the plot beats you’d expect.
Graveyard Shift - One lone cop versus vampires! Okay, it’s slightly better than that, in that the dude gets lucky when he pisses off a vampire coterie and doesn’t get killed, and his girlfriend gets turned into a vampire but manages to keep her head and ends up doing most of the actual saving in the end. (And the copaganda is minimized.) It’s a decent take on an overdone concept.
Old Head - And here we find another gem, at least for folks like me who love horror-comedy. A retired NBA player returns to his hometown with his daughter in tow, because his mother just died and the weird guy who lives in a castle up the road wants to buy her house. Unfortunately, it turns out his mother had been a vampire hunter and the castle is owned by Dracula, who wants to perform a twice-a-century rite to gain incredible power. Fortunately…Dracula’s minions are idiots and “The Knife” Glivens is perfectly happy to throw down. Witty, entertaining, solid horror-comedy. (The notes at the end say it was inspired by Fright Night, and that shows!)
Shadecraft (volume 1) - A teenage girl is attacked by mysterious shadows, but gets saved when her own shadow turns into the spirit of her comatose brother. This is a well-paced wild ride with a big twist at the end of every chapter. I have no idea if this is continued, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be because it wraps up the story nicely in one volume.
Goners – A family of monster hunters are the victims of a concentrated attack that takes out the parents of the core family but also a bunch of extended family as well, not that I could keep track of how anyone was related. This drops a lot of lore in a way that seems to assume you know more about the world than is ever explained; apparently the mom was possessed by a demon at some point so the son was technically half-demon? But the ancestor was also somehow part demon? And had the magic death book, or wrote it, or something? This has some interesting ideas that they did a bad job of actually making coherent in the story.
Random Acts of Violence - We follow the creators of the indie comic “Slasherman” who accidentally set off a wave of serial killers when dozens of fanboys decide to emulate their comic. I feel like a plot point got lost somewhere, because apparently the cause of this was their second issue dropping too early with the contest details misprinted, but there was already a copycat before then and no explanation for the early drop was ever given. Was it supposed to be supernatural, or at least connected in some way? Anyway, this is a horror film about horror comics done as a horror comic.
Nocterra (volume 1) - 13 years ago, the world was plunged into eternal night, but instead of everything freezing and dying, creatures mutated into “shades” and the surviving bits of humanity had to hide in well-lit outposts. The story follows a truck driver who picks up the man who caused the problems in the first place as a passenger, which puts her in the crosshairs of the maniac Blacktop Bill, but also sets the stage for revealing the greater nature of the darkness and a “better light.” This screams, “Not going to pay off its premise.” A little searching online revealed that this went for two more volumes but doesn’t seem to have actually answered any of the big questions behind its mythology (though it did seem to end on them defeating Bill). I’m more interested in reading an eventual Wikipedia article about the series than the rest of the series itself.
Underwinter (volume 1) - The distinctive art style makes this noteworthy; the story less so, as it’s Lovecraftian in a way that probably would have worked better as prose. A group of musicians are hired to play blindfolded for a special party, but it turns out their audience is some sort of eldritch monster that will drive them slowly insane over the months of performances. If we were imagining the monster instead of seeing it as a bird-headed man this probably would have been scarier. There are two more volumes in the bundle, but I was uninspired by the first and have no reason to believe it gets better.
Days of Hate (Act One and Act Two) – In an alternate 2022 where conservatives kept winning elections after 2016 and the fascists took over the US, we follow a pair of lesbians as one enacts guerrilla warfare against the state and the other is seemingly helping a federal agent track her down. The thing is, for all the tension that this builds…not a lot actually happens? The characters spy vs. spy at each other a bit and mostly sit around bemoaning the state of the world. The only real meat is right at the end, when we get a speech pointing out that fascists lose by showing weakness, and they’ve already lost. I’m sure this got a lot of sound and fury in 2018, but it was stuck to an extremely specific moment of political fear and it never had enough of that to properly fill 12 issues worth of material.
Infidel - A standalone horror story about a haunted apartment building. I mean, it’s really about being Muslim (or just a minority in general) in America, but the murderous ghosts really don’t help. Most of the cast doesn’t survive the story, which is precipitated by the odd choice to switch protagonists halfway through. (I think they finished the main character’s arc too fast and needed to fill out two more issues and resolve the story, and that was the work-around.) I don’t think this was really my thing, but I think it was pretty decent and accomplished some amount of what it was going for.
By Chance or Providence is a three-story horror/fantasy anthology book that I’m sure I’ve read before. Still pretty good though.
The Silver Coin (volumes 1-2) – Also an anthology book, with a series of horror stories (hitting a lot of the usual tropes) revolving around a mysterious silver coin with an eye on it. Interestingly, though the stories are generally unrelated (and the coin’s powers are nebulous in each one), this does give an origin to the coin and a later story ties back into it. Which I didn’t expect but appreciated!
Realm (volume 1) A post-apocalyptic mix-of-magic-and-technology future, where our world got invaded by orc, goblins, dragons and the like. There is another of those stories that really feels like somebody’s D&D campaign that they turned into a script. Volumes 2-3 were in the bundle, but I didn’t bother.
Hack/Slash: Son of Samhain - Following the exploits of Cassie Hack, who previously hunted “slashers” (zombie serial killers, basically) but now gets pulled into hunting monsters. With the clone/son of someone she previous had to kill. There’s backstory I’m missing here, but it also feels like they took this character and jammed a whole bunch of new mythology around her, so there’s that. This is followed by Hack/Slash: Resurrection (volume 1) which completely ignores it and picks up with Cassie living in a trailer and getting recruited to be a zombie-fighting camp counselor. Both have the feel of wanting to be Buffy but not quite getting there; and wanting to be “clever” horror but not quite managing that either.
I started Family Tree and said, “Oh, it’s Jeff Lemire. I’m already concerned.” It’s like Sweet Tooth, only this time, instead of half-animal body horror, it’s half-plant body horror. I didn’t get past the first issue; there’s three volumes in the bundle but I’m just not feeling it. I made it two issues into Two Moons (volume 1), which is about a magical native American who fights demons and talks to ghosts during the Civil War, and it just wasn’t working for me. A quick skim of Winnebago Graveyard revealed it to be more gore and painful art, so I skipped that. Ditto with Redlands (volume 1); I just wasn’t interested.
Overall: I’m tempted to hunt down any other volumes of Dark Fang, and I might read more Shadecraft if it fell in my lap. Old Head was probably my favorite from this bundle. If you like more classic splatterfest horror there’s more here for you than there was for me.
I read Girls (volumes 1-4) last year; it’s about a mysterious naked woman who appears in a small town just as it’s sealed off from the outside world by a forcefield. She has sex with a local man, lays a bunch of eggs that hatch into clones of her, and they start terrorizing the town. The sexual politics are, as you might imagine, a goddamn mess. You can tell this was written by men who were trying, but failing, to make their female characters act like humans but could only manage TV characters. (Which I think was my criticism the last time I read something by the Luna brothers, too!)
Dracula Motherf**ker - Dracula is revived in 1974 and immediately sets out to make more brides; and freelance photographer Quincy Harker gets caught in the middle of things. The portrayal of Dracula is interesting—physically, he’s an inhuman swarm of shadows, but his personality is “abusive Hollywood producer.” And to spoil the twist: The vampire hunters that come after him are his previous brides, who realized he was just using them and came to stop him from doing it to others.
Milkman Murders – Half of this book is meeting a dreary family of terrible people living a shitty suburban life. The other half is watching the mother go nuts and murder them all, and the milkman too. I think this is trying to say something pretentious about suburban life or underlying rage, but any meaning gets lost in the gratuitousness of it.
Coyotes (volume 1) – In the City of Lost Girls, it’s not safe for women to go out at night, because there are packs of coyotes who will tear them apart. But Red and One-Eye have taught themselves to use ninja weapons to fight back. This starts out as a “take back the night” metaphor but quickly turns into a fantasy inspired by the World of Darkness rpg line, as the girls join an order of female hunters and the coyotes turn out to be criminals wearing the shaved pelts of an ancient werewolf that’s being experimented on by a big corporation. (Seriously, this is somebody’s campaign about Pentex making Skin-Dancers and the new recruits for the Hunters having to stop them, with the serial numbers filed off.) The second volume was also in the bundle, but I didn’t bother.
Dark Fang (volume 1) – This is power fantasy wish-fulfillment starring a vampire ecoterrorist and I am HERE for it. She was turned a century ago, killed her sire, and lived happily underwater until an oil spill disrupted her life. Now she’s making the foolish mortals of the modern world obey her whims and killing oil executives and politicians. When she goes too far, the US government and a secret church organization conspire to have her killed...but their victory will be short-lived. This is absurdly over-the-top and it really worked for me.
The Discipline (volume 1) - By Peter Milligan, who did Shade the Changing Man and a lot of other Vertigo weirdness, and it shows. A woman is seduced into an ancient secret society of shapeshifters who fight a mysterious group of immortal body-hoppers. And there’s lots of sex and BDSM, but that’s not what it’s about, you see; it’s about the weirdness and possibly about feeling disconnected from the world and that holding supernatural meaning. (A theme Milligan has used in other works, too.) This is “volume 1”, but the main story ends—with lots of greater mysteries, of course—and no other issues seem to have ever been produced. We’ll never know if the lords of The Discipline were lying about the past or what’s going to happen to Melissa’s sister or if Orlando is really dead. Ah, well.
Nomen Omen (volume 1) - This has the “I want to grow up to be Grant Morrison” problem, piling a lot of not-actually-exposition mysteries into some very jumpy sequences that don’t actually start pretending to make sense until halfway through the volume. Once you figure out who the protagonist is and what’s actually going on (a witch-girl mixed up in the affairs of fairies; fairy politics have apparently been messed up since their princess died on 9/11) it’s…not better. I mean, the art is lovely (they make very clever use of color to represent the main character’s magic-vision) and there are lots of queer characters, and it’s trying to be clever, but it just doesn’t work for me. (There were more volumes in the bundle; I’m skipping them.)
Cold Spots - A pretty standard horror movie done as a comic miniseries: A man is hired to find a missing woman and her child (spoiler: he’s the estranged father of the kid) and traces her to a town full of ghosts that freeze everything they touch. Turns out that the kid has ghost-commending powers, and the nearby cultists want to use her to bring back their ghost/demon leader guy. Spooky child, evil ghosts, the hero survives because the plot says so, all the plot beats you’d expect.
Graveyard Shift - One lone cop versus vampires! Okay, it’s slightly better than that, in that the dude gets lucky when he pisses off a vampire coterie and doesn’t get killed, and his girlfriend gets turned into a vampire but manages to keep her head and ends up doing most of the actual saving in the end. (And the copaganda is minimized.) It’s a decent take on an overdone concept.
Old Head - And here we find another gem, at least for folks like me who love horror-comedy. A retired NBA player returns to his hometown with his daughter in tow, because his mother just died and the weird guy who lives in a castle up the road wants to buy her house. Unfortunately, it turns out his mother had been a vampire hunter and the castle is owned by Dracula, who wants to perform a twice-a-century rite to gain incredible power. Fortunately…Dracula’s minions are idiots and “The Knife” Glivens is perfectly happy to throw down. Witty, entertaining, solid horror-comedy. (The notes at the end say it was inspired by Fright Night, and that shows!)
Shadecraft (volume 1) - A teenage girl is attacked by mysterious shadows, but gets saved when her own shadow turns into the spirit of her comatose brother. This is a well-paced wild ride with a big twist at the end of every chapter. I have no idea if this is continued, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be because it wraps up the story nicely in one volume.
Goners – A family of monster hunters are the victims of a concentrated attack that takes out the parents of the core family but also a bunch of extended family as well, not that I could keep track of how anyone was related. This drops a lot of lore in a way that seems to assume you know more about the world than is ever explained; apparently the mom was possessed by a demon at some point so the son was technically half-demon? But the ancestor was also somehow part demon? And had the magic death book, or wrote it, or something? This has some interesting ideas that they did a bad job of actually making coherent in the story.
Random Acts of Violence - We follow the creators of the indie comic “Slasherman” who accidentally set off a wave of serial killers when dozens of fanboys decide to emulate their comic. I feel like a plot point got lost somewhere, because apparently the cause of this was their second issue dropping too early with the contest details misprinted, but there was already a copycat before then and no explanation for the early drop was ever given. Was it supposed to be supernatural, or at least connected in some way? Anyway, this is a horror film about horror comics done as a horror comic.
Nocterra (volume 1) - 13 years ago, the world was plunged into eternal night, but instead of everything freezing and dying, creatures mutated into “shades” and the surviving bits of humanity had to hide in well-lit outposts. The story follows a truck driver who picks up the man who caused the problems in the first place as a passenger, which puts her in the crosshairs of the maniac Blacktop Bill, but also sets the stage for revealing the greater nature of the darkness and a “better light.” This screams, “Not going to pay off its premise.” A little searching online revealed that this went for two more volumes but doesn’t seem to have actually answered any of the big questions behind its mythology (though it did seem to end on them defeating Bill). I’m more interested in reading an eventual Wikipedia article about the series than the rest of the series itself.
Underwinter (volume 1) - The distinctive art style makes this noteworthy; the story less so, as it’s Lovecraftian in a way that probably would have worked better as prose. A group of musicians are hired to play blindfolded for a special party, but it turns out their audience is some sort of eldritch monster that will drive them slowly insane over the months of performances. If we were imagining the monster instead of seeing it as a bird-headed man this probably would have been scarier. There are two more volumes in the bundle, but I was uninspired by the first and have no reason to believe it gets better.
Days of Hate (Act One and Act Two) – In an alternate 2022 where conservatives kept winning elections after 2016 and the fascists took over the US, we follow a pair of lesbians as one enacts guerrilla warfare against the state and the other is seemingly helping a federal agent track her down. The thing is, for all the tension that this builds…not a lot actually happens? The characters spy vs. spy at each other a bit and mostly sit around bemoaning the state of the world. The only real meat is right at the end, when we get a speech pointing out that fascists lose by showing weakness, and they’ve already lost. I’m sure this got a lot of sound and fury in 2018, but it was stuck to an extremely specific moment of political fear and it never had enough of that to properly fill 12 issues worth of material.
Infidel - A standalone horror story about a haunted apartment building. I mean, it’s really about being Muslim (or just a minority in general) in America, but the murderous ghosts really don’t help. Most of the cast doesn’t survive the story, which is precipitated by the odd choice to switch protagonists halfway through. (I think they finished the main character’s arc too fast and needed to fill out two more issues and resolve the story, and that was the work-around.) I don’t think this was really my thing, but I think it was pretty decent and accomplished some amount of what it was going for.
By Chance or Providence is a three-story horror/fantasy anthology book that I’m sure I’ve read before. Still pretty good though.
The Silver Coin (volumes 1-2) – Also an anthology book, with a series of horror stories (hitting a lot of the usual tropes) revolving around a mysterious silver coin with an eye on it. Interestingly, though the stories are generally unrelated (and the coin’s powers are nebulous in each one), this does give an origin to the coin and a later story ties back into it. Which I didn’t expect but appreciated!
Realm (volume 1) A post-apocalyptic mix-of-magic-and-technology future, where our world got invaded by orc, goblins, dragons and the like. There is another of those stories that really feels like somebody’s D&D campaign that they turned into a script. Volumes 2-3 were in the bundle, but I didn’t bother.
Hack/Slash: Son of Samhain - Following the exploits of Cassie Hack, who previously hunted “slashers” (zombie serial killers, basically) but now gets pulled into hunting monsters. With the clone/son of someone she previous had to kill. There’s backstory I’m missing here, but it also feels like they took this character and jammed a whole bunch of new mythology around her, so there’s that. This is followed by Hack/Slash: Resurrection (volume 1) which completely ignores it and picks up with Cassie living in a trailer and getting recruited to be a zombie-fighting camp counselor. Both have the feel of wanting to be Buffy but not quite getting there; and wanting to be “clever” horror but not quite managing that either.
I started Family Tree and said, “Oh, it’s Jeff Lemire. I’m already concerned.” It’s like Sweet Tooth, only this time, instead of half-animal body horror, it’s half-plant body horror. I didn’t get past the first issue; there’s three volumes in the bundle but I’m just not feeling it. I made it two issues into Two Moons (volume 1), which is about a magical native American who fights demons and talks to ghosts during the Civil War, and it just wasn’t working for me. A quick skim of Winnebago Graveyard revealed it to be more gore and painful art, so I skipped that. Ditto with Redlands (volume 1); I just wasn’t interested.
Overall: I’m tempted to hunt down any other volumes of Dark Fang, and I might read more Shadecraft if it fell in my lap. Old Head was probably my favorite from this bundle. If you like more classic splatterfest horror there’s more here for you than there was for me.
