A doll possessed by the devil, a freshly dug-up corpse, a musician driven to madness, a mentalist with a twisted gift, a woman who suspects her husband is a vampire, a family driven by greed — these are among the tales of terror in the hardcover comics anthology INNER SANCTUM, written and illustrated by Ernie Colón.
Pegged right on the cover as being inspired by the radio program of the same name — which birthed a series of films starring Lon Chaney Jr. in the mid-1940s — the book presents stories in the spirit of the show, rather than adaptations.
[click to continue…]
RAT CATCHER is another in Vertigo Crime’s series of wonderfully intense and suspenseful graphics novels incorporating some of the finest writers and artists working the field today. This one is a bloody and breathless story of betrayal and retribution that starts off with a bang and rarely lets up until the conclusion.
A fire breaks out in a house on a deserted stretch of road outside of El Paso, Texas. As the investigation begins, it is revealed that the location was a federal safe house, and one of its current residents was a criminal due to provide states’ evidence against a high-ranking mob boss. Moses Burdon, an aging FBI agent specializing for many years in witness protection, arrives on the scene in search of his partner, now feared dead from the blaze.
[click to continue…]
Following 2010′s delightful DICK BRIEFER’S FRANKENSTEIN, this second volume in IDW’s “Chilling Archives of Horror Comics,” BOB POWELL’S TERROR, as edited by the ubiquitous Craig Yoe, is equally oddball-wonderful.
While the first book chronologically covered 15-odd years of both style and character development, this tome is limited to a much briefer segment. These 18 stories — from magazines like WITCHES’ TALES, THIS MAGAZINE IS HAUNTED, CHAMBER OF CHILLS and many others — all range from a narrow slice between July 1951 to August 1954.
[click to continue…]
As much a biography on Art Spiegelman as it is his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, METAMAUS: A LOOK INSIDE A MODERN CLASSIC, MAUS is a beautiful book, both in visuals and themes, as the writer and artist is interviewed by Hillary Chute about the book that will not die, that he cannot escape, that he wishes would’ve been discovered only after 25 years after his death instead of being talked about for 25 years straight.
Not a chance, Art! First serialized in RAW (reprint please, Pantheon?) in 1980, MAUS not only changed the life of Spiegelman, but for graphic fiction in general. I recall being in high school when my journalism teacher, Mr. Effinger, told me I had to read this great book about the Holocaust that used mice as characters instead of humans. He loaned it to me, and I learned more about the Holocaust from it than any history class.
[click to continue…]
