The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2000: Wall of Flesh #1, 1992

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Given that this comic is from the same company that have published Femforce for the last few decades, you might be forgive for thinking that this comic, especially based on its cover, might be a weird, slightly-horrific but more titillating comic than it actually is. There's one cheesecake-y moment, with a member of Femforce in a pin-up on the Wall of Flesh, but aside from that it's reprints of old horror comics, and was meant to be the first issue of many.

 

As with a large number of the old 50s horror comics, each of these stories is really, really good. Though the comic suffers from a lack of colour, the draftsmanship apparent in each tale reinforces just how talented these early comics artists were, and just what they could do without the restrictions of the Comics Code. Indeed, it's a testament to how good they were that they could produce some stellar material even under those restrictions, but such tales often pale compared to what was possible before that draconian set of rules was enforced.

 

All that said, this is my 2000th comic! That feels like a lot. I wondered, at the beginning of the project, at what point would I feel like I'd done a significant chunk of the collection, and this is it. 2000 comics. It's a number I can still sort of visualize. I'd considered at one point taking each of the comics I'd read for the project and separating them, so I would have the read and the unread collections. Though I ultimately decided that this would be a ridiculous way to organize my collection, it would have been interesting seeing the shift, slowly but surely, over the years.

 

But what a nightmare it would have been for accessing anything.

 

So it seems somewhat fitting to me that a comic celebrating the brilliant history of comics is my 2000th read. I cannot wait to see what the next 2000 bring.

 

More to follow.

 

Further Reading and Related Posts

 

A couple of other "anniversaries:"

My post on day 100 - I thought I'd read a lot at that point.

And my post on completing the first year - we're in Year 6 right now, for anyone keeping track.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1966: Ghostly Tales #118, November 1975

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Okay, first things first. I chose this comic, amongst the other Charlton horror titles I've pulled, to read today because the character on the front reminds me of Squirrel Girl. Which is appropriate, given that the cover artist helped create her. Many times I'm interested in these old Charlton comics because they feature art from post-Marvel Steve Ditko. That said, his work in this really seems to be phoned in. A mediocre story with some mediocre art, sadly. But there's a silver lining: the issue features the work of Tony Williamsune. Mr. Williamsune is actually Tony Tallarico and Bill Fraccio, an art team who I am absolutely in love with. I illegally posted the story a few years back. I was moving about some books the other night and came across a Lynd Ward-illustrated edition of Frankenstein - I love the aesthetic of a lot of those old wood or lino cut works, and the Williamsune style, as I've said before, reminds me of these kinds of etchings.

I have been finding some of their other work in the collection, though the black and white stuff I've got, mostly in Warren Publishing reprints, isn't quite as enchanting. I don't spend nearly enough time considering the work of a colorist in comics, but I wonder if the reason I like this work so much is because of the choices the colorist made.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1965: The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves #59, October 1976

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I recently pulled from the collection all of my Charlton "horror" titles. I put the term in quotation marks because these are obviously horror stories that are trying, as the little box in the top right of the cover suggests, to keep within the framework of the Comics Code. It's a pity, because without those restrictions, I think that some of these stories would be really creepy.

That said, the very best part of this comic is the cover by Rich Larson. There's definitely something of the Bernie Wrightson school of art here, one that continues with a artist like Kelley Jones into the 80s and 90s. It's got me thinking about the some time disparities between cover art and interior art, even when it comes from the same person. The purposes of the two kinds of comic art are very different. The cover is meant to draw us in, while the interior is meant to convey narrative once we're drawn in, puns intended. But often the interior will feature art that doesn't necessarily match, or live up to, the cover. Though Mike Zeck's work on the inside of the comic is excellent, it's the only one that comes near to the quality of the cover art. And this, for the most part, has nothing to do with the relative strengths of the artists. Mike Zeck, I'm sure, could have created a spectacular cover for this comic where he commissioned to do so. But the cover, and I say this as someone with very, very little strength when it comes to visual art, seems more like a portrait, more like fine art, than the narrative art within the comic. Only rarely, and often with great delay, do we see comics with spectacular cover art in which the interior art is of the same quality.  And even then, because the interior art's ostensible purpose is to convey story, the interior and cover art are always going to be of differing quality. Cover art wants to suggest to us a story that we will want to read. Interior art attempts to tell us that story, to meet our expectations, and, hopefully, to surprise us a bit.

Not sure where the blog's going over the next little while. I feel an overwhelming urge to keep posting works by BIPOC, but I also want to delve into some of the strange stuff I've got kicking about. And I'm thinking of reading as much of the old Marvel "Onslaught" crossover as I have. Been a while since I read a crossover. So we'll see. I'll probably try to mesh everything together. Seems to be my way of doing things.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 33: Psycho #7, July 1972

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There's this weird thing that a lot of the 70s horror magazines did where they told stories in the second person. That means that each caption box used the term "you" for the focal character, as if the reader were meant to be stepping into the shoes of the character in the story. I'm sure at the time it was a cool way of writing stories, and it hearkens back somewhat to the EC horror comics of the 50s, as I've noted before about some of these B&W horror magazines. But it gets a bit tired when virtually every story in this issue is doing it. Further, there's actually a story that not only uses the second person voice in its captions, but also presents all of the action from a first person point of view. It sort of works, but it sort of doesn't, though I kind of wonder if this has something to do with readers being slightly more critically savvy, and slightly more aware of ironic distance, in contemporary times. Or maybe it's just me.

There's some amazing Pablo Marcos art in this issue. He's an artist I'm coming to appreciate more and more, and I think I'll have to start going through the old horror mags I've got to see a bit more of his work. It reminds me of the old historical comics in style, just with lots more nudity and violence.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1875: Blood Reign Saga #1, 1996

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It's been a while since I delved into the weirder sides of the collection, so I thought I'd break up my reading of various Awesome Comics titles with some blood and guts horror from London Night Studios.

This publisher is well known for its character Razor, created by London Night publisher/founder Everette Hartsoe. The comics are, by and large, violent and bloody, with full frontal shots of people exploding in showers of viscera. Oh, and most of the women are either scantily clad or just completely naked. Indeed, the main character of today's issue spends literally the entire comic nude. As does the only other female character in the comic. All the other male characters are completely clothed. This is a problem I have with comics of this ilk (they all, I think, grow out of the success that was Faust) - for some reason the women have to be sexy and/or naked, regardless of whether or not they are characters with agency or simply set dressing. Aside from titillation, not much is served by having Officer Maguire parade around in the nude all issue.

I'll admit to some curiosity about the setting - it's definitely a vampire story full of dismemberment and blood drinking, but it's also set on a different planet in a city that covers the entire surface of the globe. This moves it into the realm of science fiction-horror, but the costume that the main protagonist wears also looks somewhat like a superhero costume, and he appears to be doing "good," if such violence can be categorized as such. So a bit of a mishmash. London Night only published this one issue of the series, though it appears to be reprinting an earlier series from 1991 that ran 9 or so issues. If it pops up for cheap somewhere, I might give it a look.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

The only other London Night piece I've written about is in a post on swimsuit issues.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 31: Weird v.8 #1, February 1974

Aside from the editors, there are no credits in this magazine, so I can't tell you who drew what. Even the GCD page only lists artists - there's no record of who wrote the various stories. I find this difficult, though it's a thing that happens all the time in literary studies. We can't always know who wrote a particular piece, though contemporary digital humanists have algorithms they can run on a text that will tell us if it shares enough similarities with known writers to potentially be a lost work of some sort. The other side, however, is that very often a piece has no pedigree and no clues as to its provenance.

What got me about this magazine was the second story, entitled "Shadow of Evil." It's not that the story was necessarily a good one - it was middling, like most of the stuff in this magazine - but that it was printed completely in the wrong order, a fact I only realized as I was finishing it. I sometimes find that reprints will cut out a page or two, or revamp them, in order to fit a new publishing medium. This story is a reprint, but the revamp seems to have simply been to print it in the wrong order. *sigh*

And I can't get work as an editor.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 30: Heavy Metal v.33 #8, Fall 2009

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Going to try to get back to my weekly magazine. Otherwise it'll be the 90 Years of Comics Project, and I'd like to think that I'll finish this strange and interesting journey one day.

I'm trying to figure out ways to get the rest of my comic collection into the house and out of the garage, and the magazines, Heavy Metal and otherwise, are amongst those items in the garage. The other night I brought a couple of boxes in, and this magazine had been put into one of the boxes while I was packing. It's been a while since I read an issue, so I thought I'd check it out.

Pat Mills loves to right ultra-violence. I know that that's a given for anyone who's read 2000A.D., but I'm not super-familiar with that magazine, or Mills' work in general, so it was a bit of a revelation for me. I enjoyed Claudia Vampire Knight: Violent Women, despite not having any background for the series. After a moment's confusion, the context of the piece helped me understand the setting. It was pretty cool, very violent, and quite funny, actually. The other long-from piece in this issue was Call of the Locnar, a call-back to some of the oldest HM stories, and featured some flashes of setting that I remember from watching Heavy Metal the movie in my pre-teen years. I wonder how it would hold up these days.

More, hopefully, to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1364: Twisted Tales #3, June 1983

Damn, but Richard Corben draws some dark, dark shit.

What immediately struck me about this comic as I took it out of its bag was the amazing condition it's in. I've no record of where I got this issue, though due to the tag of "garage" in the notes in my database, I can tell that I've had it at least since 2008ish, if not longer. I'm always surprised to find a comic in this good shape and this old. It means that it's probably been stored properly since it was released, so it was probably part of a collection, or old stock from a store.

The stories are, of course, fantastic, though the cover story was a bit too narratively similar to a story from the previous issue. I can't imagine that this slipped by a writer like Jones, and perhaps the whole point of the series is to tell stories literally in the vein of the old ECs, and see what one could do with that format. It's a bit like when I read poets who mess about with the sonnet format. It's very rigid, but within that rigidity one can achieve amazing things. The 12-bar blues are a similar idea.

The other thing that really makes these comics quite different from those that inspired it is the amount of nudity. But the cool thing is it's not just female nudity. There's a shot in story "Off Key" in which a young lady slips her husband's jeans off and we get a full shot of a rather nicely-rendered bottom. It's a small thing, but what it allows, in this and in some of the other stories, is for us to see the nudity not as exploitative, as it would have been if only the women were unclothed, but as a part of the story. The couple in this story are having a private weekend away. I don't know about many of you, but when my wife and I have a private weekend away, there's very often nudity involved! I guess the short version is that the nudity and sexuality in these stories is there for verisimilitude, rather than simply to titillate. Which it also does, by the way.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 29: Eerie #109, February 1980

Since I've been doing some investigation of pre-Code horror, I thought I'd have a look at some of the horror magazine I picked up back when I got my Heavy Metal collection. At the time I thought that the HMs and the undergrounds in that purchase were the real treasures, and treasures they certainly are. But my unfamiliarity with the Warren magazines led me to overlook them, and that's a mistake.

When thinking about the tradition of EC horror comics, it is a tradition on two fronts. The first, of course, is the stories. They are, for the most part, amazing - artists and writers at the top of their games. The second front is the role it played in the crackdowns on comics in the 50s - EC becomes a metonym for the lost potential of the genre after the creation of the Comics Code. When I read Bruce Jones' series Twisted Tales a while ago, I saw him as one carrying on the tradition of these experimental tales of fear. But I neglected to note at that time that the Warren magazines of the 60s and 70s were also bearers of that torch. Mr. Jones, of course, contributes to these magazines before taking his tales to Pacific. Though they lose something in the black and white format (I've never been one of those fans who prefers B&W over colour. They both have their pros and cons.), the style is there, as is the desire to shock and amuse.

This was one of the first Eeries I've ever read, and it was okay. None of the stories wowed me. But the quality was certainly high enough that I can see why these mags are so revered. One thing that they add to the tradition, and perhaps this is inherited by Bruce Jones' later series, is women in varying states of undress. The EC comics got away with a lot in terms of their portrayals of women, but at least the ladies were clothed. The Warren magazines seem to want to equate horror and nudity, which is a strange connection to make (Eros and Thanatos, perhaps?). The question, I suppose, is does the tradition benefit from this addition?

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1354: Vault of Horror #2, October 1990

(I'm a bit behind. I read the comics, but I'm just getting them blogged now.)

Now that I have a bit of perspective, I can see where the kinds of stories Bruce Jones told in yesterday's comic come from. While I stand by my assertion that Mr. Jones is a master of the short story form, I also see now that he is upholding a venerable, and important, tradition in comics. Something I think is interesting about this is that his stories, like those in today's comic, do not suffer under the auspices of the Comics Code. And are therefore better.

I know that sounds like a sweeping statement, and some of the greatest comics I've read were produced under that governing body. But I also know that a number of the comics I've read in my life were significantly changed from the way that their creators originally envisioned them. In a well-told story, the parts aren't simply interchangeable. You can't swap out one climax for another. The parts work together as a gestalt. The trouble of censorship is that it ignores the holistic nature of storytelling and encourages a pattern instead. It may be a wide pattern, but it's a pattern nonetheless, which by its very nature occludes that which is not part of the pattern.

Anyway, the reason that these horror comics are so good is that they are allowed to think beyond the pattern. In fact, they were creating the medium from which, in this case, the pattern was born. I think I've already said that I recently read The League of Regrettable Superheroes, and one thing that Mr. Morris mentions in the introduction is that this early period of comics was one of unprecedented experimentation. Though they weren't always good, the ideas were very often strange and novel. The Comics Code discourages this kind of experimentation and encourages instead that writers pull from a large, but still limited, subset of medium's capability. It's publications like Jones' Twisted Tales, from an indie publisher, that keeps this experimental attitude alive until the mainstream catches up in the late 90s to early 2000s.

I've been struck over the last decade or so by the amazing variety of really, really good comics that are out there. It's impossible to read them all, and across the board, all genres, all (most?) publishers, are telling some fantastic stories. I think in part the dissolution of the Comics Code in recent times has allowed writers to tell stories they want to tell in much greater range, and in mainstream vehicles. Rather than the subset, they have access to the Source. I mean, if the Code were still around, there's no way we'd have the Bat Penis.

And that is all you will ever see me say about that most stupid of recent comics phenomena.


More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1353: Twisted Tales #2, April 1983

I have waxed lyrical about Bruce Jones' ability to tell a great short story while I was reading the sister title to today's comic, Alien Worlds. The stories in today's comic are a little darker, and much more brutal, and really, really remind me of the EC horror stuff I've been reading over the last little while. I get the suspicion that the similarities aren't coincidental. Mr. Jones and his collaborators are definitely of the age that they would have know much more about the pre-Code horror titles than someone of my generation. I didn't recognize the influence when I was reading the science fiction comic, but now that I'm a little more elucidated, the influence is clear.

I can't even decide on a favourite story in today's issue. The lead tale, illustrated by Mike Ploog, has an excellent ending that I didn't see coming. The final tale, drawn by the fabulous Rand Holmes presages Crash (the one about sex in cars) by quite some time. I think, really, only the Ken Steacy-illustrated "Nightwatch" fell a bit flat for me. A neat little tale, but I feel like I've seen it all before.

More of this tomorrow, perhaps. I always balk at reading horror comics so early in the morning. I worry that it's going to inflect my day.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1303: Tales Too Terrible to Tell #8, May-June 1993

A cool reprint title that I've had kicking about since I had my store, though it's apparently quite a bit older than that.

The reprints are all black and white, drawn from original art, and all from pre-Code horror titles. Editor George Suarez has an encyclopedic knowledge and collection of this era of comics, and he's only too happy to share with the readers.

It's kind of a nice irony that the short essay in the comic covering one of the big horror comic publishers of the time was on Harvey Comics. I've just finished reading a collection of their horror comics, so it was cool to get a little bit of background. What the comic also does is make me want to track down more reprints. And it'll have to be reprints as far as these comics go, I think. There's no way I can afford originals.

Well....maybe just one...

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 57 - Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites, June 2010

I was very fortunate to find this in a thrift shop a while back - a beautiful hardcover collection of some of Jill Thompson's most inspired art, in my never humble opinion. I'd read a Beasts short in one of the Dark Horse collections I have (I think), and the whole premise just spoke to me.

Now, here's a warning: just because it's about a bunch of animals investigating the occult, and just because they look kind of cute, does not mean this is a comic for kids. Well, not for all kids. Those dark ones, that're not only hurt but also kind of fascinated when they cut themselves, they'll probably love the shit out of this book.

I did, anyway. The short stories have some slight connective tissue, but otherwise they're lovely little bits of suburban horror as seen through the eyes of a group of mystical dogs (and 2 cats). They put me in mind of the very early Hellboy shorts in the Wake the Devil  and The Chained Coffin collections, and they're very obviously inspired by Mignola's wonderful sense of atmosphere. This book actually lets us in on that secret life that we're all sure our pets have when we're at work, or asleep. And, honestly, they can have it. Some of the stuff in this book is super-creepy.

Worth a read, if you can track down any of the issues. Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 1 - Eerie #31, January 1971

I have in the collection a rather large number of comics magazines, ranging from children's superhero stuff to a huge sub-collection of Heavy Metal magazine. I don't think, in most cases, I would have the time to read the whole magazine in one day. They are, by and large, longer than a traditional comic, and, in the case of the more adult-oriented publications, somewhat more complex. Bearing all this in mind, I'm going to start trying to do one a week, much like my graphic novels, and I'll be posting them on Fridays, along with my usual comic.

Today's magazine was selected on the basis of it containing a story pencilled and inked by Tony Williamsune, a gestalt entity made up of Bill Fraccio and Tony Tallarico. I came across some of their art in romance comic I picked up recently, and their style struck me immediately. Apparently the two worked closely for Warren in their horror magazines and for Charlton in just about all their genres. So far, unfortunately, none of the stories of theirs that I've found in my collection has measured up to that one romance story, though the story in this issue ("The Drop") does contain a bit of their weird, psychedelic strangeness.

This might well be the first Warren horror magazine I've ever read cover to cover. They simply weren't on my radar when I was first collecting comics, and I only have these as they were part and parcel of the collection I bought that included the aforementioned Heavy Metals. The stories were pretty good, for the most part, especially the lead tale, "Point of View," from which the Richard Corben cover is drawn. There was a kind of confusing metafictional tale called "The Alien Plague" that either didn't make sense, or didn't make sense to my tired mind when I read it. But I am looking forward to delving into the magazines I have. I've had them for less time, so they're less familiar to me than the comics in the collection. Can't wait to see what I find!

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 603: The Tomb of Dracula #34, July 1975

Of all the 70s Marvel horror titles, The Tomb of Dracula is the most lauded, boasting a great creative team in Wolfman, Colan, and Palmer, and a great pedigree in Stoker's undead protagonist. I think it's because Wolfman understands that the book Dracula isn't about the creature himself, but about the people around him, who are sucked into his orbit, and about how his evil impacts those people. Dracula appears only briefly in this issue, the rest of it devoted to the lives of those who have come within his sphere of influence. Some react by joining him, or thinking they can exploit him, and some react by trying, in vain, to stop him. Though a character himself (which is evident in the brief moments we get with him), it is as a catalyst for change, for declaration of one's good or evil intent, that the character functions as, at least in this comic. Or, it seems that way anyway, given that I'm coming in part way through a story, and leaving before it ends.

One of these days, I should actually read the novel, I guess.

Onward.

The 40 Years fo Comics Project - Day 256: Dead of Night #11, August 1975

I'm not sure how much attention is paid to the Marvel Comics horror renaissance of the mid-seventies, but it seems to me to be a fairly important moment for that genre. Though horror comics had their heyday in the decade or so before Wertham got his slimy claws all over the industry, Marvel's introduction of horror characters into their superhero universe side-stepped the problems of the Comics Code and gave us a Vertigo-esque corner of their shared universe a full 15 years or so before DC made their own dark space for dark superheroes. The likes of Hellstrom, Man-Thing, Bloodstone, and other B-listers in the Marvel U find their apotheosis here, and I've been tentatively exploring these creepy old stories for a few years now.

According to the Marvel Wikia, The Scarecrow who appears in this issue, also called Straw Man to differentiate him from the villain Scarecrow, has had a handful of appearances, is a weird spirit who opposed the demon Kalumai, and has never really had a go of his own as a character. Really, at least from this reading, he seems more like the sort of character around which a story might be hung, but not necessarily told. He manifests through a painting, so perhaps stories following the painting, rather than the character, would make this silent (aside from his insane laughter) spirit a more compelling character. Of course, had Dead of Night lasted beyond this issue, we might have seen him develop more fully. The sporadic appearances he makes over the next decade or so seem to do little to flesh him out.

Which, really, means that we'll likely have a film treatment some time in the next 5 years or so, and controversy over the lack of remuneration that creator Scott Edelman will get once Disney starts marketing little plush "Marvel's The Scarecrow" dolls, and everyone will come away from the theater saying "It was a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Disney really are getting these Marvel movies right!"

Or not. Whatever. Okay, on to more random comics tomorrow. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 107: Daffodil #1, 2010

(Seems one of my posts on hentai comics from Eros Comix was mistakenly published yesterday. Good to see that the "Read More" cut worked, I guess!)

I'll give Marvel Comics the respect it deserves for making an effort to bring non-superhero comics from Europe to a wider audience. If there's one thing that really bothers me about the fandom surrounding comics in North America is that it's ridiculously superhero-centric. Now, let's be clear: the superhero is my favourite genre in any medium. But, as the old saw goes, the proliferation of the superhero in comics would be like all novels being romance novels, except that little tiny dusty corner in the back of Chapters.

This said, Daffodil isn't too far a stretch from Marvel's usual output. In fact, I could see Michael Morbius making a guest appearance. The story, as I'm understanding it, follows three agents of a vampire government who are tasked with keeping rogue members of their species from making too many waves and alerting the humans to their presence. Though some of the humans seem to already be aware of their presence. This is one of those things I've noticed about European comics, especially fantastic ones, that we aren't always given the exposition of the most basic elements of the fictional universe the way we are in superhero comics. It's not the world that's important, but the story, and that's a philosophy I can get behind. The better North American comics writers get this (yes, I'm thinking of Morrison, but also Hickman of late), but many suffer from what I call Claremontitis, the propensity to make sure that a reader doesn't have to do any thinking for themselves.

The art style here, executed with love and brutality by Giovanni Rigano, is like a mix of Disney princesses and Friday the 13th, and it really works well. Add to this the fact that the comic is 46 pages long, and you get some serious immersion in a bloody battle between vampires and vampires and humans raging through the streets of what I think is an Italian town. Oh, and there's two little kids who get caught up with the sexy vampire agents, but haven't, as yet, been eaten. And the agents are trying to stop Nosferatu, who has unleashed his vampires on this town in order to distract from his quest to free a....demon...vampire...something evil. A something evil that seems to be working with one of the humans.

Sigh. Yet another series that I think I'm going to have to track down. This project is starting to get expensive.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 18: 30 Days of Night #2, August 2002

Issue 2 of this series does something interesting, something I certainly wasn't expecting. With a title like 30 Days of Night, I suppose I should have expected it would give us all 30 days (more or less), but since it's only a 3-issue series, I figured we'd get a few of the days, but not the whole month. Issue 2 drops us into a Barlow, Alaska that's very different from the end of last issue, where the vampires were making their way across the tundra toward the town. The Barlow of issue 2 has streets that run red with blood and ice, heads on pikes, and screaming, uncomprehending townsfolk being eaten by vampires. The 30 days have begun.

I don't have too much more to say about the art and the story that I did yesterday. Both Niles and Templesmith maintain the atmosphere expertly. Of particular note, both here and in yesterday's issue, is the differences of colour wash we see on panels taking place in Barlow and panels taking place in Louisiana. It's a small thing, but the warmth of the southern state versus the dark chill of the northern is nicely depicted through the respective tones of brown and blue.

A nice touch is that our human protagonists haven't all turned into action heroes. In fact, they're, for most of the issue, cowering in a basement hoping they won't be found and won't starve to death. Even when the sheriff scouts for food, he skulks, hiding in alleys like vermin, in some ways playing into the stereotype the vampires in the book proclaim of humans.

I should point out that I don't have issue #3, so I won't be able to comment on how the story wraps up. The introduction at the end of this issue of a vampire who thinks that the whole slaughter a town idea is a bad one throws an interesting narrative wrench into what could have been a straight ahead horror story. This twist also manages to place 30 Days of Night a little more firmly in our own world. This vampire, Vincente, asks "How many centuries has it taken for us to mesh with the living world? To make humans no longer believe we exist?" His point is that the slaughter of Barlow reveals the existence of these monsters (who are fictional, right?), and paves the way for their slaughter. Is this fictionalizing a trick that we, too, in the real world, have fallen for. Probably not.

But you never can tell....

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 17: 30 Days of Night #1, June 2002

This comic, if memory serves, kick-started a horror comic renaissance in the early 2000s when it was published. Aside from the numerous sequels (and the film version) to this series, there was a renewed interest in comics with more atmospheric art styles than the previous decade. In some ways this hearkens back to the early days of Vertigo, when such talents as Richard Case or Ted McKeever were given the freedom to run rampant over comics with their distinctive styles, now affectionately known as "Vertigo-esque." And 30 Days of Night is eminently Vertigo-esque. Where, by the 2000s, Vertigo had moved firmly into its dark fantasy mode, IDW took some chances on people like Niles and Templesmith, and was publishing strange little comics that were unlike most mainstream fare. This is well before IDW became the go to publisher of licensed properties, and the success of their horror fare likely is what put them on the radar of franchises looking to branch out into comics, or, at the very least, that success is what gave them to economic heft to compete with others who were looking to publish licensed characters and stories.

But what about the comic itself? I think, of all the genres, horror has to be one of the most difficult to pull off in a graphic medium. Templesmith's art is remarkably evocative and atmospheric. The splash page on the second and third pages of the comic evoke that stifling darkness that comes with a twilight snow storm, and that burning eye of a sun that struggles through the clouds, that slowly sets, adds to the storm a feeling of the world ending. Which, narratively, is precisely what happens for a number of people in the town of Barlow, Alaska. There are moments where Templesmith's art verges into the abstract, especially when he's depicting brutal killings, and it is occasionally difficult to really figure out what's going on. Though perhaps, given that this is vampires killing people that they consider cattle, the abstraction is a mercy. And this is how horror can work in a graphic medium. I'll go on at length in a few years about the adaptations of Lovecraft into comics, and why the vast majority of them fail, but in short it's because atmosphere is sacrificed for detail. In the case of 30 Days, I don't necessarily need to see what's been done to the victims in order to know that something has been done to them. And chances are whatever I can imagine is worse than what would present itself in a less-abstract illustration.

(Though Ennis and Dillon's Preacher occasionally blows that theory out of the water.)

As for the story, the writing, Niles is a competent comics writer. The idea for the story is great, and the reactions of his characters to their increasingly horrific plight is believable and nuanced. I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything else he's written that I've read, but I look forward to seeing if his talents stretch beyond the horror genre.