I ordered this first issue of Paper Museum into my comic store many moons ago based solely on the fact that both Mike Mignola and Mike Allred had contributed to the cover. I figured if two such luminaries felt the project was worth their time, the comics inside had to be pretty good.
And then I never read it.
But now I have and it was pretty good. I was pleasantly surprised to find work by Nick Derington in here, who is the current artist on Doom Patrol. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that this comic was taking some of the pulp fiction tenets that I quite love and turning them on their ear. In particular, "The Shark: The Silver Skull's Revenge" was really well done. Set up as an episode of a matinee, it does all the things that a serial about a mystery man should right up until then end where things get...dark.
That's perhaps a good way of summing up all of the stories in this issue. They follow a particular trajectory and then get dark, shooting off in a direction all their own. I'm going to keep an eye out for more issues of the series (I think there's at least 3), as I was duly impressed by the way that this issue lured me in with something I enjoy and then defied my expectations as to how those stories played out. That's always a nice thing to have in media, and not something that we always get.
Onward.
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