The Scarehouse (2014)

The Scarehouse (2014): written by Sarah Booth and Gavin Michael Booth; starring Sarah Booth (Corey Peters), Kimberly-Sue Murray (Elaina Forrester), Katherine Barrell (Jaqueline), Dani Barker (Emily), Teagan Vicze (Shelby), Emily Alatalo (Katrina), Jennifer Miller (Lisa), Ivana Kingston (Caitlin), and Brad Everett (Brandon): 

Perfectly serviceable, low-budget Canadian torture-horror movie involving female torturers and tortured, all over an injustice done to two prospective members of a sorority that resulted in them going to jail for manslaughter. This certainly isn't titillating. There are a couple of inventively awful moments, including the only scene that features a topless character (clearly played as topless by a body double). In the end, it's a distaff version of a classic 1950's EC Comics revenge tale, grue and amoral morality and all. Lightly recommended.

The Small Hand (2010) by Susan Hill

The Small Hand (2010) by Susan Hill: Hill's much-earlier The Woman in Black is a fine tribute to the ghost stories of the past. This recent novella, not so much. 

Having the protagonist be a jet-setting antiquarian book finder seems like an updated nod to the great ghost-story writer M.R. James, whose collections of early 20th-century ghost stories had 'Antiquary' in the title not once but twice. 

Alas, our protagonist and narrator is boring. Very boring. And the ghostly incidents are separated by what seems like endless pages of landscape description, though The Small Hand is more novella than novel. 

I suppose two other problems with The Small Hand are its somewhat glib and superficial use of mental illness and the fact that underneath it all, this is a tale of ghostly vengeance that would barely support a six-page EC Comics story. It's all quite a disappointment -- read The Woman in Black instead for Hill at her best. Not recommended.

Fall Guy for Murder: The Comics Horror and Noir of Johnny Craig

Fall Guy for Murder and Other Stories: Illustrated by Johnny Craig (The Fantagraphics EC Artists' Library Volume 5: 1951-53/ Collected 2013): edited by Gary Groth and Michael Catron; written by Johnny Craig, Ray Bradbury, Al Feldstein, and William M. Gaines; illustrated by Johnny Craig; essays by Bill Mason, S.C. Ringgenberg, and Ted White:

Johnny Craig was the artistic king of noir and the hard-boiled at EC Comics during that company's brief time of greatness in the early 1950's. His art was slick but evocative, and he could write his own stories as well as illustrate those of others. He was also notoriously slow as an artist, which makes his EC output a smaller body of work than contemporaries that include Wally Wood and Graham Ingels. But what work it was!

The Fantagraphics EC Artists' Library reprints its stories in black and white, which takes the gore quotient down a notch while allowing one to more clearly experience the art. The reader also gets helpful biographical and critical essays on Johnny Craig and the history of EC Comics.

Johnny Craig's most infamous EC cover

Highlights written and illustrated by Craig include "One Last Fling," about as loopy a vampire story as one could want. "Split Personality" offers a perverse story of dating and two-timing with a suitably bloody conclusion. "Silver Threads Among the Mold" has an extraordinarily goopy climax to end a sort-of Pygmalion-in-reverse story. 

"Touch and Go" adapts the Ray Bradbury story "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" in memorable fashion, though it goes a bit too wordy at times (EC Comics were intensely, immensely, densely wordy). The last, eponymous piece, "Fall Guy for Murder," was written by EC Publisher Bill Gaines and EC mainstay Al Feldstein. It's a brilliant twisty, metafictional piece of work that represents one of the high points for EC. 

The selection of stories is solid throughout. The reader may groan at times at the sarcastic, punny narration that appeared perhaps a bit too much in the EC books. But the overall effect is sound, beautifully rendered work -- the sort of thing that can still work as Comic Books for People Who Don't Like Comic Books, without losing any appeal to People Who Like Comic Books.

Throughout Fall Guy for Murder and Other Stories, Craig gives his all on art and stories. He's a marvelously 'clean' artist, which makes the moments of graphic horror all the more menacing. Highly recommended for fans of good comics and noir.

Creepshow (1982)

Creepshow (1982): written by Stephen King; directed by George Romero; starring Hal Holbrook (Henry), Adrienne Barbeau (Wilma), Fritz Weaver (Dexter), Leslie Nielsen (Vickers), E.G. Marshall (Upson Pratt), Viveca Lindfors (Bedelia), Ed Harris (Hank), Ted Danson (Wentworth), Stephen King (Jordy Verrill), and Joe Hill King (Billy): 

Is it an anthology movie when all the segments are written by the same person or a collection movie? 

Oh, well. 

This homage to the horror comics of the 1950's, written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero, is a mixed enough bag that it almost feels like an anthology movie from several different writers.

Creepshow is enjoyable. And it was adapted by King and Bernie 'Swamp Thing' Wrightson as an even more enjoyable comic book, complete with a cover by EC great Jack Kamen, who also provides some of the comic-book panels seen in this film. But Creepshow almost succeeds in spite of itself: King and Romero's take on those horror comics, and specifically the great EC Comics of the early 1950's, is too campy and arch by about 50%.

The decision to play up the comic-book aspects of the production with odd frames and effects and shots doesn't help things either. As in Ang Lee's Hulk, the extremely comic-booky  visuals just look sorta stupid. And in the context of the illustration style of EC Comics, which tended to stick to a very strict grid pattern for the comic book panels, many of the visual choices made by Romero make no historic sense except in relation to the Batman TV series of the 1960's.

The final mistake is literally two-fold. Romero casts Stephen King as the lead actor in one segment and his son Joe Hill King as a child in the framing story. They're both terrible actors. Romero compensates for this terribleness in King's segment by making it the most archly comedic sequence in the movie and having King yuck it up like a Little Theatre actor who got all coked up for opening night. The result is cringe-worthy and funny for all the wrong reasons -- it's like amateur hour at the Grand Guignol. Or the adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's seminal "The Colour Out of Space" from an alternate reality in which the adaptation appeared on Hee Haw Country Playhouse.

Other segments with actual professional actors in them fare better. "The Crate," the longest segment, is adapted by King from a short story of his that has never been collected in one of his collections (yes, there are stories by Stephen King that even Stephen King doesn't like). Nonetheless, it's an excellent piece of comic horror that's at its best when it's not being comic at all: only the decision to make Adrienne Barbeau's character, an annoying faculty wife, into a shrill, clueless Harpy almost undoes the rest of the segment. 

But Hal Holbrook and Fritz Weaver, old pros both, make one believe in the rest of the narrative. Tom Savini's monster design for this segment is pretty solid, though not as alien as the creature described in the story, and a little more alien might have been nice. Of course, he's limited by the visual effects technology of 1982 and the film's budget: the thing in the story couldn't have been a guy in a suit.

Really, the non-King-Family cast is terrific. Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson shine in a tale of adultery and revenge from beyond the grave. And E.G. Marshall does nasty, blackly comic work as a squirmy, technocratic businessman (dig that early 1980's computer technology!)  besieged by an endless army of cockroaches in his Kubrickian white-walled apartment. A young Ed Harris is almost unrecognizable in the weak first segment, which offers as its main charm a really beautifully imagined walking corpse. Kudos again to Savini and his creature team. 

Overall, Creepshow is worth watching, or watching again. Other than the unfortunately arch comic-book visualizations, Romero's direction is effective throughout. "The Crate" creates real tension, while E.G. Marshall's segment offers a number of clever ways to send a cockroach skittering across the screen. The frame story is negligible, and the tone would better have been modulated towards the dramatic end of things. Even the Stephen King segment generates a certain amount of poignance by its end, though I'm not sure if one feels sorry for King's rural bumpkin or for King himself being exposed so thoroughly as a dreadful, dreadful actor and then being seemingly exhorted to overplay that terribleness. In all, recommended.

Horror Comics Old and New

John Constantine Hellblazer: Reasons to be Cheerful: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Leonardo Manco, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Lorenzo Ruggiero (2004-2005; collected 2007): Excellent but frustratingly short collection of Constantine stories really ends halfway through an arc. This is something DC used to do a lot with its adult-oriented Vertigo collections, I'd assume in order to squeeze as much money as possible out of the trade paperback reprint market. They're now re-collecting Constantine's Vertigo title in lengthier collections from the start of the comic. I'd assume this arc and the subsequent The Gift will appear in one reasonably priced volume some time in about 2016.

Carey's an excellent writer, and really the second-last great writer of Constantine's now-cancelled Vertigo Universe title. The art by Leonard Manco and others is solid and moody, and the horrors suitably horrific. Of course, Constantine is Odysseus-like in his on-going ability to get everyone associated with him killed. As the main arc partially collected here deal with a threat to Constantine's relatives, friends, acquaintances, and people and things he only met once, a high death toll is assured. Who will survive and what will be left of them? Recommended, but you should probably wait for a new, more complete collection.

The EC Comics Library: Shock SuspenStories Volume 2:  written by Al Feldstein and Ray Bradbury; illustrated by Johnny Craig, Wally Wood, Joe Orlando, Jack Kamen, Reed Crandall, George Evans and others (1952-53; collected 2007): Shock SuspenStories was the Whitman's Sampler of EC Comics during that comic-book company's brief, brilliant run as the best comic-book company in the United States in the early 1950's. Stories reflected the breadth of EC's comics line, from social agit-prop stories (known as "preachies") to science fiction, horror, and suspense.

If one wants to see EC in all its glory, Gemstone's over-sized SuspenStories collections are the way to go. Grotesque horror stories with terrible puns in the title include "Beauty and the Beach" (illustrated by Jack Kamen), in which two jealous husbands enact ridiculous yet appropriate vengeance on their sunbath-loving wives, and "Seep No More", a riff on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart."

There are also two excellent adaptations of Ray Bradbury stories here -- "The Small Assassin" and "The October Game", both suitably under-stated and horrifying in their implications. Notable "preachies", which were pretty much always illustrated by the great Wally Wood, include "Fall Guy," a gimmicky story with a visual bit riffed upon in Watchmen; "Came the Dawn!", a loopy ax-murderer tale with the sexiest woman Wood ever drew for EC; and "...So Shall Ye Reap!", a justifiably much-lauded tale with dual, unreliable narrations.

Also included is artist Reed Crandall's terrifically grotesque "Carrion Death," a story of murder and vengeance meted out by the natural world. We also get not one, not two, but three stories about Martians -- and only two of those Martian races hostile -- and for unintentional laughs the bizarre and ridiculous anti-drug "preachie" "The Monkey," in which recreational marijuana usage inevitably leads to murder, as it so often does. In all, highly recommended.

Prequels, Sequels, and Adaptations

War Against Crime! Volume 2: Issues 6-11: written by Al Feldstein, William Gaines, and others; illustrated by Johnny Craig, Graham Ingels, and others (1949-1950; collected 2001): Beginning in 1950, EC's New Directions comic-book line would represent a brief high point in American comic books. But it didn't spring full-blown from the forehead of publisher William Gaines. A couple of years of experimentation preceded it as Gaines acclimated to the comic-book business and the talents began to assemble at EC.

War Against Crime! ran for eleven issues. It fed off the post-WWII crime comics boom. But by the end of the run collected here, it was clearly showing the way to the artistic and writerly excellence of the approaching New Directions line. And it didn't really die after 11 issues -- it was retitled The Vault of Horror with issue 12 and became one of EC's great horror comics. The stories and art in this volume aren't up to the standards of the approaching EC books, but they're still well-crafted, occasionally gonzo tales of suspense and horror. Recommended.


The Incal: Orphan of the City Shaft: written by Alexandro Jodorowsky; illustrated by Zoran Janjetov (1988-1991; collected 2001): Part of the prequel series to Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius's Incal series of the 1970's, The Incal: Orphan of the City Shaft features sharp, detailed, and often grotesquely imaginative artwork from Zoran Janjetov. Jodorowsky's story is bananas, as one would expect. It's all Euro-Comics-SciFi in the tradition of Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant, a dystopian adventure story explaining the origins of Incal anti-hero John DiFool.

Weird, occasionally unpleasant, occasionally poetic, visually and narratively imaginative, it's also compulsively readable and extraordinarily dense compared to most American comic books. The whole thing pays homage to Metropolis and The Time Machine with its stratified society, a literalized hierarchy oriented around a vast shaft sinking deep into a planet. But there's a lot more sex, drugs, and fetishes than in either of those estimable forebears. This is the sort of European comic book that the TV series Lexx tried and mostly failed to emulate. Highly recommended.


Just a Pilgrim: Garden of Eden: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra (2002): Ennis and Ezquerra's brutal post-apocalyptic Western continues here, as the gun-slinging religious fanatic known only as the Pilgrim encounters a team of scientists attempting to flee the devastated Earth to the stars. Terrible monsters and events abound, and Ennis and Ezquerra flinch neither in the grimy, bloody writing nor the grimy, bloody art. Recommended, but not for the squeamish.




Hypothetical Lizard: written by Alan Moore and Antony Johnston; illustrated by Lorenzo Orente and Sebastian Fiumara (1987 - 2004/2005): Alan Moore's World Fantasy Award-nominated novella from the 1980's gets the graphic treatment from Avatar Press. Antony Johnson preserves much of Moore's prose (the album includes the novella) while doing an able job of turning it into a sequential comics narrative.

The art by Orente and Fiumara is competent, though perhaps somewhat too prosaic (haha) for the fantastic goings-on. The novella appeared in a shared-universe anthology with its roots in the weird, magical cities of writers that include Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, and M. John Harrison. Moore's tale focuses on one tragic relationship in the city of Llaiven, all of it playing out in the weird and sinister brothel known as The House Without Clocks. Recommended.

Weird Science

The Complete EC Archives: Weird Science: Volumes 2 and 3: written and edited by Al Feldstein; illustrated by Al Feldstein, Wally Wood,  Al Williamson, Jack Kamen, Joe Orlando, Bill Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, and others (1951-52; collected 2007): EC Comics' wild and wooly science-fiction anthology series stands the test of time, and testifies to what was lost in American comic books with the inception of the Comics Code in the mid-1950's. These are stories for adults that can be enjoyed by kids, with nary a superhero to be found.

There are, of course, a plethora of shock endings -- this is EC Comics, and EC specialized in shock endings in every genre. Most work, some don't, and some really weren't necessary. The overall standard of writing on both the original stories and on adaptations of stories by Ray Bradbury is consistently high thanks to Al Feldstein. Oh, a few zingers go awry, but the humour is generally appropriate.

Much of the art is wonderful, whether by the matter-of-fact Jack Kamen, the occasionally grotesque Joe Orlando, the romantic Al Williamson, or the phenomenal, lush, detailed Wally Wood. Wood entered what many consider to be the peak of his artistic career on the stories included here and in other EC Comics of the time. He was only 24. The dissonance between his humans -- gorgeous women and heroic men -- and the storylines they find themselves in generates a zingy level of cognitive dissonance.

It would all be over too quickly. But the stories that remain really are, on the whole, astonishing. Some are surprisingly criticial of the United States military, and of America's paranoia in general. Some are really, really bizarrely, almost anachronistically boundary-pushing.

We've got a sex-change story. We've got a time traveller who sleeps with his own mother. We've got beautiful alien women who impregnate human men. And we've got people being eaten all over the place. And stepped on. And tortured. And asphyxiated. All in bright, glorious colour, and rendered by some of the finest artists to ever work in American comic books.

Feldstein had a tendency to wordiness that was a symptom of the era -- these are really dense stories, most of them seven pages long but packed with the information of about 25 pages of modern comic-book information. That wordiness can sometimes be skimmed, as Feldstein often describes exactly what one sees in the panel, but it also allows for character-building and world-building. On a couple of notable occasions, somebody, whether Feldstein or publisher William Gaines, saw fit to actually explain the climax of a story. I don't think it was necessary in either case, but then again, I'm not eight years old. I'd also love to know what happened the first time an easily outraged parent took a look at the sex-change story. Hoo ha, indeed! Highly recommended.

Morning Wood

Came the Dawn and Other Stories (The Fantagraphics EC Comics Library): written by Al Feldstein, Gardner Fox, and others; illustrated by Wally Wood and Harry Harrison (1951-53; 2012): These recent Fantagraphics volumes of legendary EC Comics material arranged by writer, editor, and/or artist are absolutely splendid. The black-and-white reproduction is crisp, allowing the details of the artwork to stand out. And detail is one of the keys to the greatness of that tragic giant Wally Wood.

This volume presents Wood's horror and suspense work for EC Comics, the 1950's American comic-book publisher that towered above all others in terms of the quality of its writing and art. Over the course of about three years represented in this volume, Wood rapidly becomes the detailed, evocative artist he would remain for the rest of his career. It's a stunningly fast development of an artist.

Despite the appearance of a few werewolves and ghosts early on, the volume mostly focuses on Wood at his most realistic. The lion's share of the stories come from EC's Shock Suspens-Stories title, which offered thrillers and pointed social critiques which often resembled the Warner Brother agit-prop movies of the 1930's. And while Wood was a gifted science-fiction and superhero artist, he really shines in rendering the (relatively) ordinary in all its detailed, shadowy, and often big-bosomed glory. No one drew women like Wood.

Many of the stories here are what the writers and artists and editors of EC themselves referred to as "preachies", stories meant to teach a point. The handful of anti-racism stories still pack one hell of a wallop because of both the writing and Wood's exquisite artwork, capable of both beauty and brutality in the same panel. The editors are correct in noting that EC did stories that television and movies wouldn't tell, at least in such graphic and wrenching detail.

In all, this volume is a wonder, as was Wood when he was operating at full capacity. This is marvelous stuff, and a revelation to anyone who believes that all American comic books ever did or can ever do is superheroes. Highly recommended.

Kurtzman!

Corpse on the Imjin! and Other Stories: edited by Gary Groth, written by Harvey Kurtzman; illustrated by Harvey Kurtzman, Gene Colan, Ric Estrada, Joe Kubert, Alex Toth, Dave Berg, John Severin, and others (1951-54; collection 2012): Harvey Kurtzman was one of the giants of American comics and American cartooning from the late 1940's until his death in the early 1990's. His most wide-ranging, influential creation was Mad magazine (originally an EC comic book) in the early 1950's, which he edited and wrote and partially drew over the first five increasingly popular years of its existence.

And then there were the dramatic stories for EC, contained in the other two comic books Kurtzman edited for EC at the time -- Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. The focus of these comics tended towards historical and contemporary stories of war.

Kurtzman would be labelled an obsessive micromanager if he edited a comic book today. He drew the covers. He spent immense amounts of time researching these short tales for narrative and artistic accuracy. He gave immensely detailed instructions to the artists. And he drew a number of stories himself.

The result was extraordinary. This volume brings together two seemingly disparate story streams from those two EC titles in an instructive way. These are the stories Kurtzman both wrote and illustrated, and the stories illustrated by artists, many of them to become famous later, whom Kurtzman didn't judge good enough at the time to become regular artists for his war books.

Interviews included in this volume give some of Kurtzman's reasons for not making certain artists regulars (Alex Toth eschewed detail for shadowy suggestion, thus driving the detail-oriented Kurtzman nuts; Joe Kubert was sloppy and occasionally imprecise). Keep in mind that Toth and Kubert are critically lauded giants of the American comic book. Kurtzman isn't necessarily "right" or "wrong" in his judgment -- they just didn't fit his aesthetic ethos. Nonetheless, their stories included in the volume are excellent.

More excellent, though, are the stories Kurtzman both wrote and drew. His command of both detail and shadow is extraordinary -- the stories look absolutely terrific in black-and-white, so much so that colour would seem a distraction from the artistry, though the colour covers included here show the sort of effects Kurtzman's colourist, Marie Severin, could achieve with the limited palette available to comic books at the time.

While a couple of stories descend into patriotic goofiness that Kurtzman himself derides in the interview, most are concerned more with the horror, and the horrific decisions and subsequent results, of war. The Korean War raged during Kurtzman's time at EC, and the three most striking, essential stories -- "Big 'If'", "Corpse on the Imjin", and "Air Burst" -- all focus on incidents during that war. But Kurtzman's sensibilities are more Ambrose Bierce than Sgt. Rock.

Kurtzman's best stories are thick with absurdity and sorrow, beautifully observed and executed, haunting as Hell. These are the best stories about war that American comic books would generate for decades afterwards, and really should be read by anyone who doubts the ability of comic books to be 'adult.' They're adult, without a trace of profanity or graphic violence; short, concise, laden with meaning and metaphysics. Highest recommendation.